THE  LIBRARY 

OF 

THE  UNIVERSITY 
OF  CALIFORNIA 

LOS  ANGELES 


*  ,     -001 


1X)S 


ANGELES,  CAIIFOiiNlA 


STATE  NORMAL  SCHOOL, 

ItOS  HNGEUES,  CAlk. 


WHAT  IS  PHYSICAL  LIFE 
ITS  ORIGIN  AND  NATURE 


WHAT  IS   PHYSICAL   LIFE 

ITS  ORIGIN  AND  NATURE 


BY 

WILLIAM  HANNA  THOMSON,  M.D.,  LL.D. 

Author  of  "Brain  and  Personality" 

CONSULTING  PHYSICIAN  TO  THE  BOO8EVELT  HOS- 
PITAL; TO  THE  NEW  YOBK  STATE  MANHATTAN 
HOSPITALS  FOB  THE  INSANE;  AND  TO  THE  NEW 
YOBK  BED  CBOS8  HOSPITAL;  FOBMEBLY  PBOFESSOB 
OF  THE  PBACTICE  OF  MEDICINE  AND  OF 
DISEASES  OF  THE  NEBVOUS  SYSTEM,  NEW  YOBK 
DNIVEB8ITY  MEDICAL  COLLEGE;  EX-PBE8IDENT 
OF  THE  NEW  YOBK  ACADEMY  OF  MEDICINE,  ETC. 


NEW  YORK 

DODD,  MEAD  AND   COMPANY 
1909 

I8&4U. 


Copyright,  1909,  by 

DODD,  MEAD  AND  COMPANY 

Published,  June,  xgog 


QH 


PREFACE 

DISCUSSION  about  the  origin  and  devel- 
opment of  life  upon  this  globe  cannot 
now  be  discountenanced  nor  prevented. 
It  is  a  subject  too  interesting  and  too  im- 
portant to  be  ignored  by  any  intelligent 
person.  Being  at  present  actually  the 
leading  subject  of  scientific  investigation, 
the  general  reader  should  become  ac- 
quainted at  least  with  the  principles  of 
that  investigation,  enough  to  enable  him 
to  avoid  many  prevalent  misconceptions 
about  the  conclusions  so  far  reached. 

Previous  to  our  own  age,  views  on  this 
question  were  based  either  on  speculation 
or  on  tradition.  They  now  claim  to  be 
based  entirely  on  observation.  But  ob- 


PREFACE 

servation,  when  yet  incomplete,  may  give 
rise  to  as  many  theories  as  ever  pure  spec- 
ulation did.  The  whole  subject  indeed  is 
relatively  so  new  that  only  those  who  have 
been  investigating  it  know  how  vast  its 
field  is,  and  how  much  of  that  field  is  still 
unexplored.  It  is  unpleasant  for  a  sci- 
ence to  admit  that  about  its  main  points 
it  has  little  but  hypotheses  to  offer,  but 
for  the  present  that  is  the  most  biol- 
ogy can  do.  Nor  is  this  at  all  to  its  dis- 
credit, for  the  growth  of  any  science  re- 
quires time,  and  none  more  so  than  this 
particular  and  great  science. 

This  book,  however,  is  written  to  show 
that  enough  has  been  demonstrated  al- 
ready to  prove  that  the  hypothesis  of 
earthly  life  ever  having  had  a  spontaneous, 
or  mechanical,  or  physico-chemical  origin, 
is  wholly  untenable.  This  conclusion, 
though  supported  also  by  other  strong 
evidence,  is  the  only  deduction  permissible 


PREFACE 

from  the  fact  that  life  existed  on  this  globe 
for  untold  millions  of  years  in  very  specific 
and  hereditary  forms,  before  there  ap- 
peared on  earth  a  single  living  thing  which 
could  be  visible  to  the  naked  eye.  During 
this  period  some  of  these  forms  materially 
altered  the  earth's  surface.  In  this  vast 
living  world  of  microscopic  forms,  there- 
fore, was  the  origin  of  life  here.  This 
inference  is  further  borne  out  by  the  sig- 
nificant fact  that  every  visible  living  thing 
now,  however  gigantic  in  size,  yet  begins 
with  only  a  single  microscopic  cell  to  its 
physical  being,  and  likewise  must  every 
descendant  from  it  so  begin.  Without  a 
microbic  beginning  no  form  of  life,  is  a 
universal  law.  But  the  ancient  and  per- 
manently unicellular  living  forms  still  con- 
stitute the  largest  and  most  powerful  divi- 
sion of  the  living  kingdom,  with  moreover 
such  important  relations  to  all  visible 
forms  that  we  ourselves  can  postpone  the 


PREFACE 

natural  ending  of  our  earthly  existence 
only  by  understanding  the  laws  which 
govern  this  original  domain  of  physical 
life. 

NEW  YOBK,  May  1,  1909, 


CONTENTS 


I.     The  Darwinian  and  Other  Theories 

about  Physical  Life    .       ...       .          1 

II.     Reproduction  and  Heredity  .        .        34 

III.  The   Unicellular    Micro-organisms 

the  Oldest  and  Still  the  Largest 
Division  of  the  Living  King- 
dom   57 

IV.  The  Metazoa,  or  the  Multicellular 

Forms  of  Life     ....       93 

V.     The  Great  Food  Question       .        .      118 

VI.     Adaptations 133 

VII.     As  to  Ourselves  153 


CHAPTER   I 


THE   DARWINIAN    AND    OTHJfitt    THEORIES 
ABOUT    PHYSICAL    UFE 


No  intelligent  person  can  fail  to  be  in- 

terested in  the  great  question,  what  makes 

physical    matter    living    matter?      This 

question  has  been  the  oldest,  and  still  re- 

mains the  latest  topic  of  scientific  discus- 

sion.    It  is  well,  therefore,  to  recognize  at 

the  outset  why  no  agreement  has  been 

X    reached  on  the  subject.     It  is  chiefly  be- 

*\    cause  living  matter  constantly  ceases  to 

V.    be  so.     If  it  were  not  for  death,  we  could 

^     study  life  as  we  would  any  other  phenom- 

enon. But  wholly  different  from  any  other 

great  reality  in  this  world,  life  is  and  is 

not,  leaving  us  quite  unable  to  say  what 

that  is  which  departs  with  death.     Matter 

may  change  from  one  form  to  another 


WHAT   IS   PHYSICAL   LIFE 

until  it  may  become  invisible;  but  every 
part  of  it  can  be  then  experimentally  ac- 
counted for.  Not  so  with  life.  It  goes 
at  death  no  one  knows  where,  and  never 
does  it  return  to  that  matter  which  it  once 
made  living,  whether  it  be  in  a  flower,  in 
an  insect,  or  in  a  man. 

In  the  face  of  this  mystery  one  natural 
conclusion  was  that  life  is  like  nothing  else, 
and  coming  originally  from  its  Creator,  it 
entered  the  various  living  forms  on  earth 
as  they  were  ready  made  for  it.  Milton 
in  his  Paradise  Lost  describes  the  process 
itself  of  this  making  as  quite  parallel  to 
the  hand-made  productions  of  us  human 
beings,  and  this  conception  of  the  word 
"  create  "  still  holds  its  place  in  the  com- 
mon term  creatures,  applied  to  animals  as 
the  most  living  of  things.  This  unique 
event  of  the  creation  of  living  forms  was 
readily  supposed  to  have  had  a  historical 
date  not  very  far  back  in  time. 


THE    DARWINIAN    THEORY 

But  the  modern  science  of  geology 
made  this  explanation  quite  out  of  the 
question,  at  least  so  far  as  its  conception  of 
the  term,  to  create,  is  concerned.  Geology 
presents  a  very  readable  narrative  of  past 
life  on  this  globe,  based  on  records  so 
safely  preserved  in  rocky  strata,  that 
whether  they  tell  of  great  trees,  of  giant 
animals,  of  small  insects,  or  of  delicate 
ferns,  the  complete  life  history  of  each  can 
now  be  given. 

This  story  summed  up  proves  to  a  cer- 
tainty that  the  history  of  life  on  this  earth 
is  a  very  long  one,  with  many  chapters,  each 
chapter  abounding  with  illustrations  pic- 
turing a  great  variety  of  forms  both  vege- 
table and  animal.  At  first  it  was  supposed 
that  these  forms  differed  so  from  chapter 
to  chapter  that  most  of  them  were  alto- 
gether new  when  they  first  appeared.  It  is 
now,  however,  generally  admitted  that  this 
is  not  so.  Instead  a  continuous  line  of  de- 
3 


WHAT   IS   PHYSICAL   LIFE 

scent  links  the  whole  succession  of  living 
forms  from  the  latest  back  to  the  earliest, 
until  we  cannot  but  infer  that  no  f onn  of 
earthly  life  ever  came  into  existence  with- 
out its  own  living  parentage.  This  de- 
duction is  rendered  probable  by  the  fact 
that  the  former  puzzles  of  tracing  any 
community  of  origin  between  widely  sepa- 
rated living  forms  existing  at  present  on 
the  earth,  is  being  gradually  solved  by  the 
discovery  of  geological  records  showing 
that  one  form  after  the  other  formerly  ex- 
isted where  their  nearest  of  kin  now  no 
longer  live.  In  other  words,  geology  re- 
cords not  only  great  mutations  but  also 
great  migrations  of  both  plants  and 
animals. 

But  the  chief  interest  of  this  geological 
history  of  earthly  life  lies  in  its  demonstra- 
tions of  a  prolonged  and  gradual  course 
of  development  from  earlier  simpler  to 
later  more  specialized  forms.  Now  we 


THE    DARWINIAN    THEORY 

are  just  as  free  to  investigate  the  causes 
of  this  progressive  development  as  we  are 
to  follow  the  history  of  this  earth  as  a 
planet.  Without  doubt  natural  laws  have 
presided  as  much  over  the  one  as  over  the 
other,  and  Science  is  quite  within  her 
legitimate  province  in  her  investigation  of 
either  of  these  sets  of  phenomena. 

As  this  progressive  development  could 
not  have  been  spontaneous,  a  number  of 
theories  have  been  advanced  from  time  to 
time  to  explain  its  cause  or  causes.  The 
theory,  however,  which  has  attracted  by 
far  the  most  attention  was  that  promul- 
gated by  Charles  Darwin  in  his  great 
work,  The  Origin  of  Species,  published  in 
1858.  Because  of  its  great  merits  of 
simplicity  and  apparent  adequacy  to 
explain  the  problem,  supported  as  that 
explanation  was  by  a  striking  array 
of  scientific  evidence,  it  was  hailed  with 
much  enthusiasm  as  all  that  could  be 
5 


WHAT   IS    PHYSICAL   LIFE 

asked  for.  An  illustration  is  found 
in  the  following  passage  from  the 
book,  In  Starry  Realms,  hy  Sir  Robert 
Ball,  an  eminent  astronomer,  published 
afterwards,  which  concludes  with  this 
estimate  of  the  Darwinian  theory:  "I 
would  liken,"  he  says,  "  the  voyage  of 
the  Beagle  (during  which  Darwin  began 
his  studies)  to  the  immortal  voyage  of  Co- 
lumbus. In  each  case  a  new  world  was 
discovered.  .  .  .  Astronomers  were 
the  first  evolutionists.  They  had  sketched 
out  a  majestic  scheme  of  evolution  for  the 
whole  system,  and  now  they  are  rejoicing 
to  find  that  the  great  doctrine  of  Evolu- 
tion has  received  an  extension  to  the  whole 
domain  of  organic  life  by  the  splendid 
genius  of  Darwin."  After  describing 
how  the  astronomer  went  about  complet- 
ing his  evolution  of  worlds,  he  proceeds: 
"  His  work  being  done,  he  now  hands  over 
the  continuance  of  the  history  to  the  biolo- 
6 


THE    DARWINIAN    THEORY 

gist.  The  lifeless  earth  is  the  canvas  on 
which  has  been  drawn  the  noblest  picture 
that  modern  science  has  produced.  It  is 
Darwin  who  has  drawn  this  picture.  He 
has  taken  up  the  history  of  the  earth  at 
the  point  where  the  astronomer  left  it  and 
he  has  made  discoveries  which  have  influ- 
enced thought  and  opinion  more  than  any 
other  discoveries  that  have  been  made  for 
centuries.  .  .  .  The  method  Darwin 
adopts  is  of  the  most  captivating  sim- 
plicity. When  the  history  of  science  in 
our  century  comes  to  be  written,  the  inter- 
est will  culminate  in  the  supreme  discovery 
of  Natural  Selection." 

The  enthusiasm  of  Sir  Robert  Ball  then 
leads  him  on  to  extend  the  principle  of 
Darwinism,  which  as  usual  he  loosely 
speaks  of  as  synonomous  with  evolution,  to 
surmising  that  very  little  is  needed  now  to 
suppose  that  life  had  a  spontaneous  origin 
from  matter.  "  Can  it  be  possible  that 
7 


WHAT   IS    PHYSICAL   LIFE 

the  wondrous  and  complex  phenomena 
known  as  life  are  purely  material?  Un- 
usual, indeed,  must  be  the  circumstances 
which  will  have  brought  about  such  a  com- 
bination of  atoms  as  to  form  the  first  or- 
ganic being.  But  great  events  are  always 
unusual.  It  is  not  necessary  to  suppose 
that  such  an  event  as  the  formation  of  an 
organized  being  shall  have  occurred  often. 
If  in  the  whole  course  of  millions  of  years 
past  it  has  once  happened,  whether  on 
land  or  in  the  depths  of  the  ocean,  that  a 
group  of  atoms,  few  or  many,  have  been 
so  segregated  as  to  have  the  power  of  as- 
similating outside  material,  and  the  power 
of  producing  other  groups  more  or  less 
similar  to  themselves,  we  have  but  little 
more  to  demand  of  the  theory  of  Spon- 
taneous Generation.  The  more  we  study 
the  nature  of  matter,  the  less  improbable 
will  it  seem  that  organic  beings  should 
have  so  originated." 
8 


THE    DARWINIAN    THEORY 

As  a  commentary  upon  these  exultant 
words  of  an  astronomer,  written  in  1892, 
we  would  merely  cite  a  sentence  from  a 
communication  by  the  eminent  botanist, 
Sir  Thistleton  Dyer,  F.R.S.,  to  the  lead- 
ing English  scientific  journal  Nature.,  July 
30,  1896.  "  The  Darwinian  theory  of  Or- 
ganic Evolution  seems  hardly  to  have  a 
convinced  supporter  left  [in  England]  ex- 
cept Mr.  Alfred  R.  Wallace  and  myself!  " 
(Dyer).  This  communication  was  writ- 
ten after  a  prolonged  discussion  just  held 
at  the  Linnean  Society,  in  which  many  of 
the  leading  English  biologists  took  part, 
with  the  result  of  revealing  a  state  of  opin- 
ion among  those  gentlemen  which  Mr. 
Dyer  pathetically  laments.  Of  course  Mr. 
Dyer  does  not  mean  that  there  are  no 
Darwinians  surviving  in  England  but 
Mr.  Wallace  and  himself.  Instead  of 
that,  the  public  highways  especially  are 
crowded  with  individuals  with  Sir  Robert 
9 


WHAT   IS   PHYSICAL   LIFE 

Ball's  notions.  What  Mr.  Dyer  means  is 
that  there  are  now  only  two  identifiable 
specimens  remaining  of  the  kind  among 
biologists.  Had  Sir  Robert  Ball  but  a 
moderate  acquaintance  with  biology,  he 
would  have  known  that  even  in  1892  there 
was  a  rapidly  spreading  conviction  among 
the  only  kind  of  men  who  have  a  claim 
to  speak  authoritatively  on  the  subject, 
that  the  Darwinian  theory  is  hopelessly 
inadequate  to  explain  the  course  of  de- 
velopment of  living  forms,  for  so  thor- 
oughgoing an  evolutionist  as  Professor 
Karl  Pearson,  F.R.S.,  says,  "  It  can 
explain  no  more  than  fringes  of  evolu- 
tion," and  that  every  year  even  these 
fringes  are  being  materially  curtailed. 
Moreover,  that  Mr.  Ball  had  as  little  right 
to  leave  his  telescope  and  deliver  himself, 
as  above  cited,  about  spontaneous  genera- 
tion, as  a  biologist  would  have  to  tell  what 
he  thought  about  the  planet  Venus  after 
10 


THE    DARWINIAN    THEORY 

trying  to  observe  it  with  a  one-twelfth  inch 
oil  immersion  lens  of  his  microscope,  is 
sufficiently  illustrated  by  the  words  on  this 
subject  of  one  of  the  greatest  biologists 
of  the  age,  Professor  Carl  Wilhelm  von 
Nageli  of  Munich,  who  says,  "  That  the 
distance  which  separates  man  from  the 
lowest  bacterium  is  far  less  than  the  dis- 
tance between  the  lowest  bacterium  and 
inorganic  matter!  "  Then  as  to  the  "  su- 
preme discovery  of  Natural  Selection " 
accounting  for  the  origin  of  species,  Pro- 
fessor Nageli  remarks,  that  Natural  Selec- 
tion might  have  been  of  use  to  prune  some 
leaves  from  the  biological  tree,  but  that  it 
was  totally  unable  to  give  origin  to  the 
smallest  twig  thereof. 

The  Darwinian  theory,  as  is  well 
known,  first  postulates  an  inherent  tend-  / 
ency  to  spontaneous  variation  in  all  di- 
rections, in  living  organisms,  plant  or  an- 
imal, and  secondly,  that  those  variations 
11 


WHAT   IS    PHYSICAL   LIFE 

will  survive  which  prove  advantageous  to 
the  organism  in  the  struggle  for  existence 
with  either  competing  living  forms  or  with 
the  conditions  of  its  environment.  All 
changes,  therefore,  which  finally  lead  to 
distinct  species  come  simply  by  the  elim- 
ination of  the  less  adapted  by  the  better 
adapted  to  their  surroundings.  This  lat- 
ter proposition,  or  the  survival  of  the  fit- 
test by  Natural  Selection,  of  course  as- 
sumes that  an  organism,  once  acquiring  an 
advantage,  would  transmit  it  to  its  de- 
scendants. Natural  Selection  would  be 
of  no  avail  in  producing  varieties,  and 
their  species,  unless  inheritance  comes  in 
to  so  establish  a  variation.  The  trans- 
mission of  advantageous  characters,  there- 
fore, is  one  of  the  great  original  pillars  of 
the  Darwinian  edifice. 

But  it  should  be  noted  here  that  biology, 
or  the  science  of  life,  is  no  simple  thing  by 
any  means.     Instead  its  domain  is  so  vast 
12 


THE    DARWINIAN    THEORY 

and  varied  that  by  an  unavoidable  neces- 
sity its  cultivation  can  be  carried  on  only 
by  great  numbers  of  hard-working  spe- 
cialists, such  as  zoologists,  naturalists, 
botanists,  entomologists,  embryologists, 
paleontologists,  anatomists,  physiologists, 
pathologists,  physicians,  etc.,  every  one  of 
whom  has  something  important  to  say 
about  the  development  and  laws  of  life. 
On  any  other  highly  complex  subject  ex- 
pert opinion  is  most  sensibly  asked,  but 
in  biology  only  such  opinion  is  worth  any- 
thing. And  it  is  but  the  simple  truth  to 
say  that  at  present  the  opinion  of  such  ex- 
perts in  all  the  different  fields  of  biological 
research  is  preponderately  adverse  to  the 
claims  of  the  Darwinian  theory,  and  is 
steadily  growing  more  so.  A  few  cita- 
tions, out  of  many  more  which  our  limits 
forbid  our  quoting,  from  the  writings  of 
leading  European  and  American  biol- 
ogists will  suffice  to  make  this  plain. 
13 


WHAT   IS   PHYSICAL   LIFE 

Professor  Wilhelm  Roux  of  the  Uni- 
versity of  Jena  is  one  of  the  foremost 
original  investigators  in  this  field  in 
Europe.  In  his  latest  work  of  some  two 
thousand  pages,  entitled  Mechanism  and 
Biology,,  before  advancing  his  own  re- 
markable views,  he  first  labors  to  de- 
molish the  Darwinian  theory  as  one 
would  clear  the  ground  of  tree  stumps  be- 
fore building  a  house,  which  he  does  by 
showing  the  extreme  difficulty  of  account- 
ing by  simple  natural  selection  for  the  in- 
numerable adaptations,  carried  out  into 
the  finest  detail,  which  are  met  with  in  all 
the  organs  of  the  vertebrate  body.  We 
cannot  go  over  the  whole  case  which  Roux 
makes  out,  but  will  only  quote  this  sen- 
tence frorr  a  review  of  his  book  by  Mr. 
E.  W.  Me  !3ride,  a  leading  member  of  the 
younger  school  of  English  naturalists: 
"  It  must  be  admitted  that  Professor 
Roux  has  brought  together  a  most  power- 


THE    DARWINIAN    THEORY 

f ul  case  against  the  doctrine  of  the  all-suf- 
ficiency of  natural  selection,  and  we  feel 
sure  that  his  arguments  will  awaken  a 
sympathetic  chord  in  the  minds  of  many, 
if  not  most,  zoologists,  among  whom  there 
is  a  general  feeling  that  we  want  more 
than  natural  selection." 

Professor  H.  F.  Osborn  of  Columbia 
University,  in  an  elaborate  paper  which 
attracted  wide  attention  both  in  this  coun- 
try and  in  Europe,  read  before  the  Ameri- 
can Association  of  Science,  August,  1894, 
on  the  "  Rise  of  Mammalia,"  sums  up  with 
the  conclusion  that  "  The  point  is  that  a 
certain  trend  of  development  is  found  in 
each  species  leading  to  an  adaptive  or  to 
an  inadaptive  final  issue,  but  extinction,  or 
survival  of  the  fittest,  seems  to  exert  little 
influence  en  route" 

No  name  stands  higher  among  working 
biologists  than  that  of  Professor  Oscar 
Hertwig  of  Berlin.  But  in  his  ponderous 
15 


WHAT   IS   PHYSICAL   LIFE 

volume  on  Epigenesis  he  does  not  conceal 
his  contempt  for  the  Darwinian  theory  by 
Natural  Selection,  and  similar  repudia- 
tions of  it  are  reported  with  each  succeed- 
ing year.  Thus  Professor  Von  Hart- 
mann  says,  "  that  in  the  first  decade  of  the 
twentieth  century  it  has  become  apparent 
that  the  days  of  Darwinism  are  numbered. 
Among  its  latest  opponents,  besides  many 
others,  are  such  savants  as  Eimer,  Pro- 
fessor of  Zoology  in  the  University  of 
Tubingen;  Gustave  Wolff;  De  Vries,  Pro- 
fessor of  Botany  in  the  University  of  Am- 
sterdam ;  Hooche,  and  Fleischmann.  Pro- 
fessor Fleischmann  of  the  University  of 
Erlangen  maintains  that  the  Darwinian 
theory  of  descent  has  not  a  single  fact  to 
confirm  it  in  the  realm  of  Nature,  that  it 
is  not  the  result  of  scientific  research  but 
purely  the  product  of  the  imagination." 
Professor  G.  Henslow,  F.R.S.,*  says: 

*  XIX  Century  and  After  Magazine,  November,  1906, 
p.  795.  16 

<** 


THE    DARWINIAN    THEORY 

"  It  is  now  half  a  century  since  Darwin's 
work  on  the  Origin  of  Species  by  Natural 
Descent  has  been  published.  Up  to  the 
present  day  it  is  an  undisputable  fact  that 
not  a  single  variety  or  species  of  any  wild 
animal  or  plant  has  ever  been  proved  to 
have  had  its  origin  by  means  of  natural 
selection." 

The  eminent  Russian  botanist,  H.  Kor- 
chinsky,  labors  to  prove  that  natural  se- 
lection, to  use  an  American  phrase,  does 
not  select  worth  a  cent,  but  if  anything 
prevents  the  formation  of  new  species. 
His  five  propositions,  which  we  have  nc 
room  to  quote,  by  which  he  claims  to  show 
that  natural  selection  has  no  real  power  to 
select,  contrast  greatly  with  the  expres- 
sions of  some  writers  who  imagine  that 
natural  selection  has  been  operating 
through  infinite  time  in  the  past.  But  as 
the  remains  of  multicellular  living  forms 
occur  first  only  in  the  lower  Cambrian 
17 


WHAT   I£    PHYSICAL   LIFE 

rocks,  from  that  date  to  this  period  is  but 
a  speck  in  infinite  time.  But  granting 
this  restricted  period,  numbers  of  biol- 
ogists maintain  that  the  supposed  powers 
of  environment  are  more  destructive  than 
selective,  or,  as  Dr.  Morier  says,  the  proper 
term  for  them  is  natural  Extermination 
rather  than  natural  Selection.  Among 
the  countless  copepods  which  a  whale  sifts 
for  food  out  of  sea  water,  what  difference 
does  it  make  if  some  of  the  copepods  had 
become  more  developed  than  others  or  not ; 
they  all  would  have  to  go  together  down 
the  whale's  throat. 

Among  American  biologists  the  oppo- 
nents of  the  theory  of  natural  selection  are 
no  less  numerous.  As  Professor  V.  L. 
Kellogg*  of  the  Leland  Stanford  Uni- 
versity of  California,  in  his  elaborate  work 

*  Professor  Kellogg's  book  affords  one  of  the  best  re- 
views that  is  published  on  this  subject,  and  contains  im- 
partially the  statements  of  both  those  who  favor  and  who 
oppose  the  Darwinian  Theory  among  biologists. 

18 


THE    DARWINIAN    THEORY 

entitled  Darwinism  To-day,  says,  page 
90:  "  Men  using,  or  rather  testing,  these 
theories  every  day  in  their  work  in  field 
and  laboratory,  find  selection  insufficient 
to  explain  the  conditions  that  their  ob- 
servation and  experiments  reveal  to  them. 
These  men  are  students  in  all  the  lines  of 
biological  work,  whether  zoologists,  bot- 
anists, paleontologists  or  animal  and  plant 
breeders.  From  all  these  lines  of  work 
come  increasing  complaints ;  selection  can- 
not explain  for  me  what  I  see  to  exist. 
From  some  the  cry  is  more  bitter;  selec- 
tion is  a  delusion  and  false  guide.  I  re- 
ject it  utterly.  For  me  [Kellogg]  I  re- 
peat this  is  an  objection  of  much  signifi- 
cance and  importance  that  the  biological 
experimentalists,  the  students  of  variation 
and  heredity,  of  life  mechanics,  are  find- 
ing the  rigid  theory  of  selection's  control 
of  all  processes  and  phenomena  a  rack  on 
which  they  will  no  longer  be  bound." 
19 


WHAT   IS    PHYSICAL   LIFE 

But  we  need  not  weary  the  reader  with 
more  of  such  citations,  or  with  long  lists 
of  the  names  of  authorities,  which,  how- 
ever well  known  to  students  of  biological 
literature,  to  the  general  reader  would  con- 
vey as  little  information  as  they  would 
to  a  Chinaman.  All  we  would  remark  is 
that  these  criticisms  of  Darwinism  do  not 
come  from  amateurs^  but  from  qualified 
experts.  It  is  to  be  regretted  that  some 
of  them,  especially  in  Germany,  show  that 
there  can  be  as  acrid  an  odium  scientificum 
as  ever  there  was  an  odium  theologicum, 
for  one  professor  intimates  that  there  can 
be  no  Darwinian  except  he  be  afflicted  with 
a  congenital  inability  to  think  clearly, 
while  another  says  that  a  believer  in  nat- 
ural selection  must  have  softening  of  the 
brain. 

The  chief  credit  which  historically  will 
attach  to  the  name  of  Charles  Darwin  is 
that  more  than  any  one  else  in  our  times 
20 


THE    DARWINIAN    THEORY 

he  established  the  conviction  among  biol- 
ogists that  the  processes  of  life  are  as  com- 
pletely subject  to  natural  laws  as  are  all 
other  processes  in  the  world.  He  also 
possessed  in  an  eminent  degree  a  fair  and 
open  mind  towards  opponents,  while  he 
pursued  his  course  of  observation  and  ex- 
periment in  the  spirit  of  an  ideal  scientific 
investigator.  Full  appreciation  of  these 
personal  traits  was  widely  expressed  at  the 
recent  celebration  of  the  centenary  of  his 
birth  by  the  leading  biologists  of  Europe. 
At  a  like  gathering  in  America,  the  chair- 
man,* Professor  H.  F.  Osborn,  while  re- 
marking that  "  there  is  no  denying  that 
there  is  to-day  a  wide  reaction  against  the 
central  feature  of  Darwin's  thought,"  yet 
eloquently  sets  forth  the  lasting  honor 
which  will  attach  to  Darwin's  name  in  the 
world  of  science. 


*  Popular  Science   Monthly,  Darwin  Number,  April, 
1909. 

21 


WHAT   IS   PHYSICAL   LIFE 

Certain  great  discoveries,  however, 
about  the  mechanism  of  life,  which  every 
one  should  know  and  which  should  be 
taught  in  our  schools,  have  done  much  to- 
wards modifying  the  views  of  biologists  on 
the  Darwinian  theory. 
••""  The  physical  basis  of  life  is  a  sticky  sub- 
stance called  protoplasm,  and  when  its  re- 
lation to  living  growth  was  first  discerned 
its  spontaneous  generation  seemed  as  pos- 
sible as  it  did  to  Sir  Robert  Ball.  This 
conception,  however,  was  very  temporary, 
so  that  Huxley  always  winced  in  after  life 
at  the  mention  of  Bathybius,  a  term  which 
he  invented  for  an  imaginary  ooze  lining 
the  ocean  bottom  and  which  he  fancied 
might  generate  the  first  beginnings  of 
protoplasm.  But  on  investigating  the 
protoplasm  in  cells,  instead  of  being  a 
jelly-like  thing  of  simple  construction,  it 
proved  to  be  the  most  complex  substance 
in  the  world,  of  such  infinite  complexity 


THE    DARWINIAN    THEORY 

that  biologists  are  all  equally  lost  in  try- 
ing to  imagine  it.  Because,  it  turns  out, 
that  all  forms  of  life,  no  matter  how  large 
they  may  grow  afterwards,  have  to  begin 
as  specks  of  protoplasm  visible  only  by 
high-power  microscopes.  There  is  no  help 
for  it:  without  a  microbic  beginning  no 
form  of  life,  great  or  small,  is  a  universal 
law.  The  sulphur  bottom  whale  of  the 
Pacific,  though  he  may  bulk  afterwards 
and  weigh  as  much  as  3000  men,  yet  first 
starts  in  his  one  microscopic  primordial 
cell  just  as  a  towering  oak  also  does.  All 
biological  investigation,  therefore,  had  to 
be  shifted  from  adult  living  forms  to  their 
first  beginnings,  when  only  a  microscope 
can  see  them,  with  the  result  of  a  corre- 
sponding shrinkage  in  the  belief  of  many 
Darwinians.  When  sheep,  dogs,  fowls, 
and  such  like  familiar  creatures  were  the 
objects  of  study,  it  was  comparatively  easy 
to  trace  the  origins  of  their  many  varia- 


WHAT   IS   PHYSICAL   LIFE 

tions,  and  to  illustrate  these  by  the  prod- 
ucts of  selection  by  human  breeders.  But 
when  the  search  for  the  secret  of  all  phy- 
sical life  led  first  to  a  microscopic  cell,  and 
then  to  a  much  smaller  body  in  the  cell 
called  its  nucleus,  and  then  to  far  minuter 
things  in  the  nucleus  called  the  chromatin 
rods,  the  whole  question  of  natural  selec- 
tion, along  with  many  other  like  questions, 
seemed  in  danger  of  being  lost  both  to 
sight  and  to  conception. 

But  the  original  Darwinians  were  soon 
to  experience  another  severe  strain.  Pro- 
fessor August  Weismann,  the  eminent  bi- 
ologist of  the  University  of  Freiburg,  an- 
nounced as  the  result  of  his  observations 
that  no  physical  change  occurring  in  the 
body  of  either  a  plant  or  animal  during 
its  lifetime  can  be  transmitted  to  its 
descendants. 

To  an  ordinary  mind  this  assertion 
seems  ruinous  to  the  whole  Darwinian 
24 


THE  DARWINIAN  THEORY 
edifice,  which  was  first  based  on  the  trans- 
mission to  offspring  of  advantageous  vari- 
ations to  help  them  in  their  struggle  for 
existence.  Herbert  Spencer  at  once  took 
the  alarm  at  Weismann's  declaration  and 
exclaimed  that  without  the  transmission  of 
acquired  characters  there  could  be  no  evo- 
lution, and  like  expressions  came  from 
others  and  continued  down  to  Sir  Francis 
Darwin,  son  of  Charles  Darwin,  who  in 
his  inaugural  address  as  president  of  the 
British  Association  of  Science,  at  its  meet- 
ing in  Dublin  last  year,  declared  that  true 
Darwinism  must  wage  a  war  to  the  knife 
against  this  dictum  of  Weismann.  The 
weight  of  opinion,  however,  among  biol- 
ogists seems  at  present  to  favor  this  con- 
tention of  Weismann,  that  acquired  char- 
acters are  not  transmitted,  but  when  he 
proceeds  to  show  how  he  is  as  good  a  Dar- 
winian as  anybody  by  his  purely  specu- 
lative views  of  what  comes  out  of  the  chro- 
25 


WHAT   IS    PHYSICAL   LIFE 

matin  rods  in  the  nucleus,  he  falls  foul  of 
an  equally  eminent  biologist,  Oscar  Hert- 
wig,  who  complains  that  Weismann  leads 
us  into  an  invisible  world,  in  which  there 
is  no  foothold  for  research,  and  with  no 
foundation  of  fact. 

This  is  only  a  sample  of  the  interchange 
of  personal  compliments  which  has  been 
going  on  between  different  authorities  in 
biology  for  the  last  twenty  years.  The  only 
agreement  is  that  every  one  believes  in  evo- 
lution, but  as  to  the  process  of  evolution 
there  is  an  all-round  disagreement,  with  no 
prospect  of  a  satisfactory  substitute  for 
the  Darwinian  theory  in  sight. 

The  only  alternative  theories  which  have 
attracted  much  notice  are  the  once  cele- 
brated Lamarckian  theory,  and  the  more 
modern  theory  of  Orthogenesis.  La- 
marckianism,  in  distinction  from  the  nat- 
ural selection  of  Darwinism,  has  Use  and 
Disuse  for  its  principle.  By  constant  use 


THE    DARWINIAN    THEORY 

living  parts  grow  and  by  disuse  they  atro- 
phy. It  was  by  constant  stretching  that, 
in  the  course  of  generations  the  giraffe's 
neck  became  so  long,  and  likewise  the  legs 
and  bill  of  the  crane  as  it  waded  in  the 
mud  for  its  food.  It  was  in  degeneration 
from  disuse,  however,  that  this  theory  had 
its  strongest  arguments,  just  where  the 
Darwinian  theory  is  weakest,  for  natural 
selection  does  not  account  for  degenera- 
tion, because  nothing  would  select  degen- 
eration as  advantageous,  while  the  eyeless 
fishes  in  the  rivers  of  the  Mammoth  Cave 
afford  direct  evidence  of  the  loss  of  organs 
by  disuse.  The  Lamarckian  theory,  there- 
fore, is  much  simpler  than  the  Darwinian, 
if  only  it  were  in  accord  with  facts,  which 
it  is  not,  except  as  just  stated  in  the  case 
of  atrophies.  No  native  tendency  to 
strong  arms  in  the  children  of  blacksmiths 
is  discernible.  Moreover,  Lamarckianism 
depends  even  more  than  Darwinism  on  the 
07 


WHAT   IS   PHYSICAL   LIFE 

inheritance  of  acquired  characters,  and  if 
such  are  not  inherited,  the  whole  theory 
faUs. 

Meanwhile,  an  increasing  number  of 
biologists,  such  as  von  Nageli  and  the  late 
Professor  Eimer,  along  with  the  American 
paleontologists,  Cope,  Osborn,  Whitman, 
and  a  number  of  others,  have  become  so 
convinced  of  the  inadequacy  of  either  the 
Darwinian  or  the  Lamarckian  theories  to 
explain  everything  that  they  are  sure  of 
the  existence  of  some  other  important 
factors  in  the  processes  of  evolution, 
though  these  have  not  yet  been  demon- 
strated. They  find  development  often 
following  lines  which  seem  predetermined 
for  it  to  follow  before  either  natural  selec- 
tion or  use  could  have  exerted  any  influ- 
ence. The  facts  on  which  this  doctrine  of 
predetermination,  or  orthogenesis  as  it  is 
called,  are  based,  are  very  numerous  and 
are  wholly  inexplicable  on  any  hypothesis 
28 


THE    DARWINIAN    THEORY 

yet  framed  to  account  for  them.  The 
only  objection  which  has  been  advanced  to 
orthogenesis  is  that  it  is  unsatisfactory  to 
confess  ignorance  instead  of  trying  to 
guess  what  we  are  ignorant  of.  But  as  all 
admit  that  the  territory  of  the  Unknown 
in  biology  is  great,  and  its  boundaries  not 
even  discernible,  this  objection  does  not 
seem  sensible. 

But  the  general  reader  should  be  on  his 
guard  now  against  too  hasty  conclusions. 
When  he  compares  the  confident  tone  with 
which  Tyndall,  in  1874,  speaks  of  matter 
as  eternal,  and  containing  in  it  the  prom- 
ise and  potency  of  life,  with  the  words  of 
Sir  George  Darwin,  uttered  from  the  same 
chair  of  president  of  the  British  Associa- 
tion of  Science  in  1905,  that  the  elements 
of  matter  have  had  neither  an  eternal  past, 
nor  will  they  have  an  eternal  future,  and 
that  the  mystery  of  life  is  as  impenetrable 
as  ever,  he  may  suppose  that  these  learned 
29 


WHAT   IS   PHYSICAL   LIFE 

people  know  of  no  certainty.  When  in 
addition  he  hears  little  else  than  a  confus- 
ing din  of  controversy  among  biologists 
about  their  theories,  he  may  then  think 
that  this  once  awesome  divinity  of  Science 
is  after  all  not  unlike  Dickens'  portentous 
Mrs.  Harris. 

But  nothing  could  be  more  untrue,  and 
therefore  unjust.  Neither  men  of  science 
nor  any  one  else  have  reason  to  doubt  that 
all  phenomena  in  Nature,  including  those 
of  physical  life,  are  due  to  natural  causes, 
which  science,  therefore,  has  every  right  to 
investigate.  Thus  if  something  beyond 
Nature's  powers  is  to  be  found  anywhere 
it  would  be  in  the  mysterious  processes  of 
cell  growth  in  an  animal  body.  There 
every  different  cell  finds  its  own  exactly 
proper  place,  a  brain  cell  in  the  brain,  a 
secreting  cell  in  a  gland  and  never  in  a 
muscle,  and  so  on  in  beautiful  adjustments 
without  number,  as  if  "some  great  intelli- 
30 


THE    DARWINIAN    THEORY 

gent  agency  presided  over  the  whole  order- 
ing. But  unfortunately  this  quasi-super- 
natural superintendent  sometimes  makes 
serious  mistakes  in  his  operations.  What 
is  a  common  wart?  It  is  a  mistake  in  nu- 
trition, which  if  dark  in  color  should  be 
cut  out,  at  least  in  elderly  people,  because 
no  one  can  tell  when  it  may  turn  into  a 
well-named  malignant  growth.  Likewise 
all  tumors  have  no  business  to  be  where 
they  are  found,  but  particularly  those 
dread  cancers  and  sarcomas  which  kill  by 
growing  just  where  they  please  in  defiance 
of  all  order  or  superintendence.  More- 
over, that  some  very  general  law  of  per- 
verted nutrition  is  here  at  work,  is  proved 
by  cancerous  tumors  occurring  in  all  kinds 
of  vertebrates,  sheep,  oxen,  lions,  tigers, 
mice,  and  even  in  fishes.  But  more  than 
that  we  can  artificially  change  the  whole 
process  of  development  by  shaking  or  de- 
taching the  primitive  layers  from  one  an- 
31 


WHAT   IS   PHYSICAL   LIFE 

other,  so  that  four  frogs  will  grow  where 
but  one  frog  should,  while  each  of  these 
frogs,  though  perfect,  yet  will  be  only 
one-fourth  the  size  of  the  ordinary  frog. 

Wholly  different,  however,  in  origin 
from  cancerous  growths  are  some  tumors 
found  in  the  bodies  of  young  persons  who, 
on  their  account,  rarely  live  beyond  their 
twentieth  year.  These  tumors  are  called 
embryomas  and  are  usually  large,  but  on 
being  examined  are  found  to  consist,  as  the 
anatomist  Bland  Sutton,F.R.S.,  describes 
them,  of  an  utterly  confused  heap  of 
every  tissue  of  the  body,  either  general  or 
special :  cartilage,  bone,  gland,  muscle  and 
nerve  cells,  besides  hairs  and  streaks  of  the 
choroid  membrane  of  the  eye — all  mixed 
up  without  a  single  attempt  at  arrange- 
ment. The  explanation  is  that  this  awful 
thing  started  originally  as  a  twin,  but  be- 
coming enclosed  in  a  bodily  cavity  of  its 
fellow,  the  unnatural  physical  conditions 
M 


THE    DARWINIAN    THEORY 

under  which  its  processes  of  growth  were 
placed  caused  it  to  make  a  sorry  mess  of 
them. 

Living  processes,  therefore,  are  living 
enough,  and  nothing  but  life  can  originate 
them;  but  after  that  it  is  physical  condi- 
tions which  determine  how  they  shall  live. 


CHAPTER    II 

REPRODUCTION    AND    HEREDITY 

THE  facts  referred  to  at  the  close  of  the 
last  chapter  prove  that  physical  or  ma- 
terial life  is  regulated  throughout  by  nat- 
ural laws.  These  laws  are  just  as  natural 
as  the  laws  of  chemistry  and  of  physics, 
and  therefore  science  is  properly  con- 
cerned in  endeavoring  to  discover  what 
they  are.  This  statement  involves  the 
conclusion  that  each  living  form,  whether 
plant  or  animal,  comes  into  being  as  nat- 
urally as  an  icicle  or  a  waterfall.  But 
this  conclusion  by  no  means  implies  that 
the  laws  of  life,  however  natural,  are  the 
same  in  kind  with  other  natural  laws,  such 
as  those  of  chemistry  or  of  physics,  or  with 
any  conceivable  modification  of  them. 
This  question  must  be  judged  on  its  own 
34 


REPRODUCTION 

merits  until  the  decision  can  be  given  ac- 
cording to  the  facts.  After  that  is  done, 
we  contend  that  a  consideration  of  the 
most  essential  elements  in  the  existence 
and  in  the  development  of  life  shows  that 
they  are  totally  different  from  all  other 
facts  or  laws  and  cannot  possibly  be  de- 
rived from  them.  This  is  our  .contention ; 
that  life  is  not  physico-chemical  in  origin 
or  in  nature  we  would  emphasize  from 
the  outset. 

When  men  began  to  think  about  the 
phenomena  of  Nature,  their  readiest  ex- 
planation for  everything  was  furnished  by 
the  consciousness  of  their  own  personality. 
As  they  acted  according  to  their  own 
wishes,  hopes  or  fears,  which  led  to  their 
creating  objects  or  causing  events  to  come 
to  pass,  so  they  concluded  that  everything 
in  nature,  good  and  bad  alike,  must  have 
a  corresponding  designing  personality  to 
account  for  it.  The  progress  of  knowl- 
35 


WHAT   IS   PHYSICAL   LIFE 

edge,  however,  dispelled  all  that,  until  it 
changed  thunder  itself  from  an  awe-in- 
spiring voice  into  only  a  loud  noise. 

But  it  was  in  accounting  for  the  phe- 
nomena of  life  in  Nature  that  this  old  con- 
ception lasted  the  longest.  A  sort  of 
supernatural,  vital  force  was  imagined  to 
be  the  only  explanation  here,  and  in  med- 
ical science  particularly  this  imaginary 
vital  force  arrested  all  progress  for  many 
centuries. 

But  this  once  crudely  conceived  myth- 
ical vital  force  remains  as  a  name  to  dis- 
turb the  reasoning  of  those  who  repudiate 
its  existence.  Because  there  is  no  vital 
force,  therefore  it  is  concluded  that  what 
things  and  forces  we  know  of  must  ac- 
count for  life  by  supplying  everything 
needed  both  for  its  origin  and  for  its 
developments.  Those  things  are,  first, 
matter  as  a  substance,  and  then  such 
forces  we  know  of  that  act  on  matter, 


REPRODUCTION 
like  light,  heat,  chemical  affinity,  elec- 
tricity, etc.  Hence  it  is  maintained  that 
because  we  know  nothing  else  except  the 
properties  of  matter  and  of  force,  there- 
fore there  is  nothing  besides  these  for  life 
to  come  from. 

We  demur  from  this  conclusion  most  de- 
cidedly, on  the  ground  that  the  chief  laws 
of  life  are  now  pretty  well  understood,  and 
so  also  are  the  chief  laws  of  matter  and  of 
force,  and  that  there  is  no  correspondence 
between  these  two  whatever.  Every  al- 
leged instance  of  living  matter  becoming 
so  without  the  agency  of  previous  life 
proves  on  examination  to  be  erroneous. 
That  all  life  is  from  life,  and  from  noth- 
ing else,  is  therefore  the  proposition  which 
we  will  discuss. 

It  is  just  here  that,  as  it  seems  to  us, 

some  reputable  biologists  have  failed  to 

perceive  the  real  point  at  issue.     Because 

some  processes  of  growth  and  of  nutrition 

37 


WHAT   IS    PHYSICAL   LIFE 

have  been  experimentally  proved  to  be 
profoundly  affected  by  purely  chemical 
agents,  they  appear  to  accept  this  as  evi- 
dence that  it  is  all  of  a  piece  throughout, 
and  that  further  investigation  will  show 
that  one  after  another  of  supposed  vital 
phenomena  will  take  their  place  in  the  list 
of  physico-chemical  effects  until  no  such 
thing  as  vitality  will  remain. 

Thus  one  of  the  hitherto  most  myste- 
rious of  living  processes,  that  of  the  cleav- 
age and  arrangement  of  cells  in  the  early 
stages  of  animal  development,  has  been 
shown  to  be  fundamentally  modified  by 
varying  the  chemical  composition  of  the 
fluids  in  which  the  animal  living  cells  are 
bathed.  Professor  Loeb,  for  example, 
more  than  confirmed  similar  experiments 
by  other  biologists,  by  demonstrating  that 
unfertilized  eggs  of  echinoderms,  or  sea 
urchins,  when  dipped  in  a  dilute  solution 
of  magnesium  chloride,  then  went  on  to 
38 


REPRODUCTION 

grow  into  complete  parthenogenic  forms 
of  that  animal.  But  these  results  are  only 
in  line  with  what  was  well  known  before, 
that  living  matter,  while  living,  can  both 
be  affected  by,  and  also  itself  give  rise  to 
every  kind  of  physical,  chemical,  and  elec- 
trical reactions,  just  as  any  other  active 
agent  does.  Loeb  had  to  have  living  em- 
bryos to  experiment  with,  and  all  he  did 
was  to  affect  their  processes  of  develop- 
ment by  his  solution  of  magnesium  chlo- 
ride. He  could  no  more  thus  originate 
these  animals  than  he  could  make  a  new 
egg. 

But  what  is  demanded  is  how  to  account 
by  non-living  agencies  for  the  really  essen- 
tial elements  in  life.  These,  and  not  the 
accompaniments  of  vital  activities,  are  the 
things  to  explain. 

Thus  we  may  well  ask  what  physical, 
mechanical,  chemical,  electrical,  or  other 
non-living  agency  comes  anywhere  near 


WHAT   IS    PHYSICAL   LIFE 

accounting  for  the  really  basic  fact  about 
life,  namely,  Reproduction,  because  by  its 
processes  vital  reproduction  excludes  its 
being  classified  with  anything  else  on 
earth.  Thus  a  whale  is,  to  be  sure,  a  large 
living  thing  whose  circulation,  respiration, 
muscular  and  nervous  activities  illustrate 
many  physico-chemical  laws.  But  how 
can  these  laws  account  for  the  biological 
history  of  this  animal  himself?  As  we 
have  already  stated  in  the  preceding  chap- 
ter he  began  his  individual  existence,  as 
every  other  living  thing,  animal  or  plant, 
large  or  small,  has  to  begin,  as  a  micro- 
scopic unicellular  entity.  It  is  the  be- 
ginning of  things  which  settles  the  nature 
of  things,  and  when  a  whale  begins,  he  is 
certainly  a  whale,  though  1,500,000  such 
whales  might  be  got  into  a  space  not  larger 
than  a  pin's  head.  He  also  is  then  noth- 
ing else  than  a  whale,  and  by  no  possibility 
can  he  grow  into  a  fish  any  more  than  he 
40 


REPRODUCTION 

can  grow  into  a  bird,  for  whales  are  mam- 
mals and  therefore  separated  by  an  im- 
passable biological  gulf  from  all  fishes. 
Likewise  an  elephant,  an  onion,  and  a 
grasshopper  all  begin  in  single  primordial 
cells  of  about  the  same  size.  Therefore, 
in  their  first  microscopic  cells  it  is  all  de- 
termined what  they  are  going  to  be.  But 
determined  by  what?  By  physico-chem- 
ical laws  ?  Again,  in  that  vanishing  speck 
of  matter  constituting  the  unicellular 
whale  is  already  settled  just  how  all  the 
billions  of  cells  of  his  future  body  are  to 
grow,  how  many  of  them  there  are  to  be, 
and  where  the  bone  cells,  the  muscle  cells, 
the  nerve  cells,  and  all  the  other  bodily 
cells  are  to  find  their  places  to  the  end  of 
that  whale's  life. 

But  what  thing  in  physics,  or  what  force 

among  forces,  acts  in  that  way  whether 

singly  or  in  conjunction  with  other  things 

or  forces  ?    A  thing  may  become  larger  by 

41 


WHAT   IS   PHYSICAL   LIFE 

accretion,  but  never  by  the  working  of 
complex,  internal  organization.  No  thing 
on  earth  can  grow  unless  it  be  living.  So 
no  force  or  forces  can  shape  any  form  of 
matter  so  that  it  will  reproduce  itself. 
Force  and  matter  can  make  an  icicle,  but 
the  icicle  remains  as  lifeless  as  both  the 
force  and  the  matter  which  produced  it. 

But  a  new  and  portentous  factor  in  the 
problem  now  challenges  our  consideration, 
namely,  that  of  Heredity.  Again,  as  al- 
ready mentioned,  in  the  wonderful  or- 
ganization of  this  minute  particle  of  whale 
matter  we  find  that  in  a  minuter  portion 
of  it,  namely  its  nucleus,  there  is  a  minuter 
portion  of  this  in  turn,  which  goes  by  the 
name  of  the  chromatin  substance,  and  that 
this  latter  substance  chiefly  bears  the  in- 
delible impress  of  all  the  whale's  ancestry 
back  to  the  first  whale.  On  that  account 
this  whale,  as  he  grows,  will  demonstrate 
that  whales  used  to  walk,  for  in  his  adult 


HEREDITY 

state  he  has  legs  just  where  legs  ought  to 
be  and  complete  in  every  bone  thereof,  but 
as  they  are  now  no  longer  usable  in  the 
ocean  where  he  lives,  they  are  deeply  im- 
bedded under  his  skin,  much  as  an  English 
nobleman  of  ancient  lineage  hangs  up  in 
his  halls  the  coats  of  armor  of  his  ances- 
tors, as  mementos  of  days  long  gone  by, 
on  account  of  rifle  bullets. 

But  a  physical  atom  or  ion  with  the  at- 
tribute of  heredity  is  as  unthinkable  as 
hereditary  hydrogen.  We  must  therefore 
take  leave  here  from  matter  and  all  its 
known  properties,  and  restrict  our  atten- 
tion to  the  familiar  forces  above  men- 
tioned, which  play  on  matter  according  to 
their  well  ascertained  laws.  All  admit 
that  these  forces  are  themselves  lifeless, 
but  it  is  imagined  that  somehow  they  can 
vivify  matter  and  make  it  living.  This  is 
momentariiy  thinkable,  but  soon  ceases  to 
be  so  when  we  are  really  confronted  with 
43 


WHAT   IS   PHYSICAL   LIFE 

the  facts  of  both  reproduction  and  hered- 
ity. No  one  of  the  known  forces  can  re- 
produce itself,  still  less  can  it  go  through 
the  cycles  of  successive  generations,  any 
more  than  matter  itself  can.  A  hereditary 
unit  of  heat  is  as  absurd  as  hereditary 
helium.  But  life  without  coming  by 
hereditary  descent  and  then  going  on  to 
reproduction  does  not  exist.  Both  these 
elements  are  as  inseparable  from  life  as 
attraction  is  inseparable  from  gravitation. 
But  where  else  is  there  even  an  analogue, 
not  only  to  both,  but  to  either  one  of  them? 
Vital  reproduction  is  difficult  enough,  but 
heredity  is  ten-fold  more  so,  and  we  have 
already  seen  to  what  grievous  mental 
strain  some  biologists  have  been  subjected 
in  trying  to  explain  how  every  cell  and 
part  in  an  adult  body  exists,  potentially 
if  not  actively,  in  the  single  primordial 
cell  "  when  as  yet  there  were  none  of 
them,"  and  exists  there  according  to  that 
44 


HEREDITY 

which  has  been  transmitted  to  it  through 
countless  successions,  not  of  adult  bodies 
but  of  previous  minute  primordial  cells. 

Of  what  avail  then  in  our  discussion  is 
it  to  cite  the  peculiar  set  of  electrical  cur- 
rents in  functionating  nerves,  or  processes 
of  growth  affected  by  mineral  salts  ?  We 
might  as  well  say  that  fire  is  caused  by  the 
smoke  which  generally  accompanies  it.  In 
view  of  the  infinitely  complex  processes 
fundamentally  related  to  vital  reproduc- 
tion, through  most  ancient  descent,  what 
is  the  probability  of  experimenters  being 
able  some  day  to  give  us  a  formula  or  re- 
ceipt for  making  life  altogether  de  novo? 

Meantime,  the  reader  should  now  note 
that  though  in  the  primordial  cell  the  mat- 
ter associated  with  life  is  so  near  nothing, 
life  itself,  so  far  as  its  most  specific  proper- 
ties and  potentialities  are  concerned,  exists 
to  an  unexampled  degree.  The  microbic 
whale,  for  example,  starts  with  more  vital 
45 


WHAT   IS   PHYSICAL   LIFE 

elements  in  his  microscopic  body  than  ever 
he  will  possess  afterwards,  for  by  the  time 
he  has  grown  into  an  adult  whale,  and 
bulks  as  much  as  a  brigade  of  men,  he  has 
spent  much  the  greater  part  of  his  original 
capital  stock  of  vital  capacities.  There 
remains  in  him  no  potential  reserve  of  that 
living  power  to  form  an  eye  or  an  ear  or 
any  new  tissue  or  organ  which  he  had  when 
he  counted  only  one  cell  to  his  physical 
being.  All  he  does  when  he  is  full  grown 
is  to  keep  what  he  has  until  it  begins  to 
decay  with  age. 

It  is  true  that  there  are  still  traces  in 
him  of  his  original  capacity  for  making 
new  tissues  in  his  power  of  repairing 
bodily  injuries.  In  animals  lower  in  the 
scale  of  life  than  whales,  this  power  of  re- 
pair is  sometimes  strikingly  illustrated. 
Thus,  if  the  crystalline  lens  of  the  eye  of  a 
larval  salamander  be  extracted,  this  crea- 
ture soon  makes  a  new  lens  out  of  the 
46 


HEREDITY 

posterior  cells  of  his  iris,  as  complete  and 
as  good  as  his  original  lens.  Many  biol- 
ogists seem  to  think  that  this  behavior  of 
a  mutilated  salamander  greatly  deepens 
the  mysteries  of  living  processes.  If  it 
did  not  actually  occur  it  would  otherwise 
seem  as  likely  as  that  the  sides  of  a  man's 
pocket  should  spontaneously  replace  the 
same  as  before  a  stolen  pocket-book,  even 
to  the  dollar  bills  which  were  in  it  when 
it  was  lost.  But  after  all  there  is  no  more 
mystery  in  this  salamander's  making  a  new 
lens,  than  there  is  in  his  making  his  first 
lens.  He  only  shows  that  as  he  did  it  once 
he  can  do  it  again  by  the  same  old  power 
which  was  in  his  primordial  cell.  The 
only  difference  seems  to  be  that  animals 
higher  in  the  scale  than  the  salamander, 
lose,  as  they  grow,  most  of  that  original, 
all-creating  capacity  to  make  new  parts, 
until  nothing  is  left  of  it  except  a  limited 
capacity  for  repairs.  ,But  the  power  to 
47 


WHAT   IS   PHYSICAL   LIFE 

repair  and  that  entirely  to  regenerate  are 
only  different  degrees  of  that  inherent  liv- 
ing endowment  residing  in  the  first  micro- 
scopic cell. 

When  a  whale  is  full  grown  he  has  mat- 
ter in  quantity  sure  enough.  Every  ac- 
tion then  of  his  nerves,  especially  his  motor 
nerves,  gives  rise  to  electrical  currents; 
every  contraction  of  his  muscles  liberates 
heat,  and  all  his  secretory  activities  are  ac- 
companied with  chemical  changes.  But 
do  any  of  these  elements,  or  all  of  them 
together,  constitute  his  life?  Not  at  all. 
What  life  he  has  comes  from  the  life  of  his 
primordial  cell,  and  from  nothing  else. 

But  the  mysteries  of  heredity  are  not 
confined  to  the  potentialities  of  the  pri- 
mordial cell.  All  cells  and  tissues  in  the 
body  are  ruled  by  its  sway,  and  can  never 
depart  from  it.  No  body  cell  in  a  walrus, 
from  its  head  to  its  tail,  can  take  on  the 
pattern  of  a  whale's  body  cell,  because 
48 


HEREDITY 

each  cell  of  a  living  body,  whether  it  be 
plant  or  animal,  has  its  own  special  pat- 
tern. The  pattern  of  a  walrus'  body  cells 
is  wholly  different  from  that  of  a  whale's, 
however  identical  they  may  be  in  chemical 
composition. 

Moreover,  we  encounter  here  one  of 
those  biological  marvels  by  which  science 
has  recently  revealed  the  fact  that  the 
blood  is  the  most  hereditary  thing  about 
us,  for  its  hereditary  elements  override 
everything  in  the  make-up  of  the  phys- 
ical animal  .body,  whether  it  be  the  shape 
of  the  skeleton, 'of  the  lungs,  of  the  ali- 
mentary canal,  or  of  the  skin.  It  even 
overrides  ancestral  habits  as  to  the  great 
Food  Question — Darwin's  chief  creator, 
which  works  by  the  strife  in  Nature  about 
how  to  eat  or  keep  from  being  eaten.  This 
discovery  of  the  hereditariness  of  the  blood 
came  about  in  this  way. 

Some  of  the  most  recondite  investiga- 
49 


WHAT   IS    PHYSICAL   LIFE 

tions  in  the  history  of  medicine  have  been 
about  the  mechanism  of  Immunity,  or  why 
a  single  attack  of  certain  infectious  dis- 
eases renders  a  person  immune  from  a 
second  attack.  It  was  through  these  in- 
vestigations that  some  valuable  antitoxins 
were  discovered  in  the  immunized  blood 
serum,  which  raise  hopes  that  we  may  yet 
find  the  antitoxins  for  the  worst  forms  of 
our  deadly  infections,  just  as  an  anti- 
venom  has  been  found  for  the  cobra's 
poison,  and  another  for  that  of  the  rattle- 
snake. But  each  of  these  antitoxins  is 
specific  in  that  it  does  not  afford  any  pro- 
tection except  just  against  its  own  poison. 
This  led  Professor  Wasserman  of  Vienna 
to  investigate  whether  the  blood  of  each 
kind  of  animal  did  not  contain  some  in- 
gredients which  would  be  specific  to  that 
animal,  that  is,  not  to  be  found  in  any 
other  animal,  a  fact  which,  if  found,  might 
be  of  use  in  medico-legal  cases. 
50 


HEREDITY 

His  results  made  this  so  probable  that 
Professor  Geo.  H.  F.  Nuttall,  F.R.S.,  of 
the  University  of  Cambridge  took  the 
subject  up,  and  has  so  extended  its  appli- 
cation that  a  single  drop  of  blood  from 
any  animal  now  suffices  not  only  to  show 
by  its  peculiar  chemical  reactions  what 
animal  it  comes  from,  but  also  how  nearly 
related,  or  the  opposite,  an  animal  is  by 
his  blood  to  other  animals.  It  begins, 
therefore,  to  look  as  if  the  whole  classi- 
fications of  zoology  may  have  to  be  re- 
arranged according  to  these  blood  tests. 
Thus,  a  drop  of  the  blood  of  a  walrus 
shows  no  relation  with  a  drop  of  whale's 
blood,  or  of  the  blood  of  any  other  ceta- 
cean, such  as  seals  or  porpoises,  which,  like 
the  walrus,  are  mammals  that  have  taken 
to  the  sea.  Instead  of  that,  the  blood  of 
the  walrus  immediately  reacts  with  the 
blood  of  horses,  asses,  and  zebras,  thus 
proving  that  he  is  an  equine  that  no  longer 
51 


WHAT   IS    PHYSICAL   LIFE 

crops  grass,  but  goes  where  he  can  live 
on  an  exclusively  fish  diet.  Likewise,  the 
hippopotamus  is  shown  to  be  a  modified 

Pig- 
Where  blood  relationship   exists,   but 

is  distant,  these  reactions  are  proportion- 
ately faint,  but  where  no  reactions  occur 
there  is  no  relationship  at  all.  Thus,  ge- 
ology indicates  that  birds  are  descended 
from  reptiles,  and  oddly  enough,  the  blood 
of  a  bird  shows  a  distinct,  though  very 
faint,  reaction  with  the  blood  of  a  snake, 
but  none  whatever  with  that  of  the  winged 
bat  or  the  flying  squirrel,  for  these  are 
mammals. 

On  the  other  hand,  the  marsupials,  once 
such  a  great  family,  but  now  reduced  to 
the  kangaroo,  the  opossum,  and  a  small 
creature  in  South  America,  have  now  not 
a  single  blood  relation  left.  As  to  man, 
he  has  no  relationship  to  monkeys,  but  the 
blood  of  anthropoid  apes  shows  a  very 
5* 


HEREDITY 

faint  reaction  with  his.  Meantime,  all  the 
races  of  man  are  unmistakably  of  one 
blood,  whatever  their  color  or  abode. 

Heredity,  therefore,  is  inseparable  from 
living  matter,  whether  it  be  in  man,  in 
animals,  or  in  trees,  or  whether  in  the 
smallest  microscopic  particle  thereof.  In 
one  sense  it  and  physical  life  are  one,  for 
no  matter  can  be  living  without  it.  It  is 
absolutely  unique,  for  what  else  is  hered- 
itary? Certainly  nothing  physico-chem- 
ical that  we  know  of.  It  doubtless  has  its 
own  laws  as  everything  else  has.  But  laws 
explain  only  sequences,  and  never  origins. 
At  every  turn  we  find  mysteries  connected 
with  heredity  which  no  known  law  ex- 
plains. But  so  accustomed  do  we  become 
to  associate  heredity  directly  with  parent 
and  child,  linking  the  one  to  the  other, 
that  we  do  not  know  what  to  say  about  the 
worker  bee,  which  for  the  past  hundreds 
of  thousands  of  years  never  had  a  working 
53 


WHAT   IS    PHYSICAL   LIFE 

father  nor  a  working  mother  to  impart  to 
it  that  wonderful  skill  which  it  shows  in 
constructing  the  cells  of  its  honeycomb. 
But  bees  abound  in  unaccountable  inher- 
itances. Darwin's  survival  of  the  fittest, 
however,  may  contribute  a  ray  of  light  on 
one  of  their  constitutional  laws.  With  a 
do-nothing  male,  after  his  case  has  been 
duly  considered,  two  of  his  spinster  sisters 
take  him  outside  and  put  him  to  death, 
thus  ridding  their  community  of  such  a 
make-weight.  We  have  not  yet  reached 
that  utilitarian  stage  of  development,  but 
Darwin  thinks  that  if  we  only  had  the 
useful  moral  standards  of  bees  we  would 
see  nothing  wrong  in  such  a  performance. 

But  bees  are  not  the  only  hymenoptera 
which  illustrate  the  puzzles  of  heredity. 

In  one  particular  species  of  wasps,  the 
Eumenes,  the  female  makes  a  most  pe- 
culiar provision  for  the  nourishment  of  the 
offspring  which  she  will  never  herself  live 
54 


HEREDITY 

to  see,  and  as  the  same  was  thus  provided 
by  her  mother  who  likewise  died  before 
her,  she  could  not  have  learned  this  re- 
markable proceeding  from  her.  This 
wasp  first  makes  a  secure  papier  mache- 
like  box,  as  it  may  be  called,  and  having 
finished  that,  she  then  goes  on  a  hunt  for 
the  proper  spiders,  which  she  stings  one 
by  one,  and  then  deposits  in  the  end 
of  the  box.  This  sting  does  not  kill  the 
spiders,  but  only  benumbs  them,  so  that 
they  remain  hypnotized,  as  it  were,  await- 
ing their  doom  from  the  larval  wasp  when 
it  hatches  out  of  the  egg  which  the  wasp 
lays  only  after  enough  spiders  have  been 
deposited  for  the  hatched  larva  to  feed 
upon.  Here  this  wasp  shows  an  accurate 
knowledge  of  the  nervous  anatomy  of 
spiders,  as  she  stings  only  that  ganglion 
which  does  not  include  the  respiratory 
centres,  for  that  would  be  fatal.  As  the 
adult  wasp  does  not  often  feed  upon  spi- 
55 


WHAT   IS    PHYSICAL   LIFE 

ders  herself,  this  benevolent  arrangement  is 
for  the  purpose  of  providing  jiroper  baby 
food  for  her  young.  But  how  in  the  world 
did  she  inherit  this  most  complex  way  of 
doing  things  ?  It  would  not  have  done  at 
all  to  kill  the  spiders  with  her  sting,  for 
this  larval  wasp  must  have  only  living 
meat,  and  not  even  meat  kept  in  cold 
storage. 

But  the  genus  hymenoptera  includes  not 
only  bees,  wasps,  hornets,  and  other  insects, 
but  also  the  ants,  and  we  might  fill  pages 
with  the  curious  hereditary  habits  of  the 
ants  alone,  which  are  as  inexplicable  as 
any  of  the  rest.  To  ascribe  them  to  In- 
stinct is  simply  to  get  behind  the  most  ex- 
pansive of  all  words  for  veiling  blank 
ignorance. 


56 


CHAPTER   III 

THE  UNICELLULAR  MICRO-ORGANISMS  THE  OLD- 
EST AND  STILL  THE  LARGEST  DIVISION  OF  THE 
LIVING  KINGDOM 

AFTER  the  discussion  in  the  previous 
chapter  of  the  subjects  of  Reproduction 
and  Heredity,  we  now  can  properly  allude 
to  the  subject  of  Abiogenesis,  which  means 
either  the  spontaneous  or  artificial  genera- 
tion of  life  from  non-living  sources.  Some 
experimenters  have  seemed  to  think  that 
by  bringing  together  in  proper  conditions 
the  physical  components  of  living  things 
and  subjecting  them  to  the  action  of  vari- 
ous forces,  life  might  be  generated  anew 
much  as  spontaneous  combustion  some- 
times occurs  in  collections  of  inflammable 
materials.  This  apparently  not  improb- 
able surmise  has  led  to  speculations  about 
57 


WHAT   IS   PHYSICAL  LIFE 

abiogenesis  from  ancient  times,  because  a 
priori  there  seemed  to  be  no  logical  reason 
for  denying  that  as  physical  life  must  have 
had  a  beginning  once  on  this  earth,  this 
might  happen  again.  This  conclusion  is 
all  the  more  natural  for  those  who  main- 
tain the  doctrine  of  the  physico-chemical 
origin  of  life,  because  all  the  physical  and 
chemical  elements  are  yet  with  us  as  ef- 
fective as  ever.  Repeated  attempts,  there- 
fore, have  been  made  to  produce  life  arti- 
ficially, and  occasionally  we  hear  of  such 
experiments  being  apparently  successful. 
But  to  be  living,  such  an  artificial  speci- 
men must  be  capable  of  a  cell  formation 
which  then  goes  on  to  reproduce  itself  by 
cell  division  or  mitosis,  and  then  continues 
to  do  so  independently  for  successive  gen- 
erations. If  it  can  do  nothing  of  the  kind, 
then  this  supposed  living  substance  is  a 
delusion. 

But  it  would  seem  as  if  this  subject 
58 


MICRO-ORGANISMS 

could  be  best  investigated  in  that  great 
division  of  the  living  kingdom  which  is 
composed  wholly  of  unicellular  organisms, 
or  living  things  which  have  but  one  cell  to 
their  physical  being.  This  apparently 
would  make  our  problem  quite  simple,  for 
as  there  are  no  complex  relations  with  other 
things  to  interfere,  we  have  but  one  living 
thing  before  us  which  lives,  reproduces  it- 
self, and  dies  the  same  small,  single,  uni- 
cellular entity  throughout.  Moreover, 
these  things  are  universally  rated  as  the 
lowest  and  simplest  forms  of  life  and 
therefore  possibly  not  far  removed  from 
the  inorganic  kingdom. 

,But  the  more  we  learn  about  the  unicel- 
lular world  of  life,  the  more  unthinkable 
abiogenesis  becomes. 

In  the  first  place,  unicellular  forms  dif- 
fer widely,  and  yet  so  definitely  between 
themselves  that  they  can  be  divided  into 
four  distinct  genera.  First  come  the 
59 


WHAT   IS   PHYSICAL  LIFE 

Protozoa,  which  are  of  animal  nature. 
Second,  the  Bacteria,  which  have  vegetable 
affinities.  Third,  the  unicellular  Algse, 
and  fourth,  the  Foraminifera. 

Among  bacteria  there  is  no  mixture  or 
crossing  to  anything  like  the  degree  to  be 
found  among  visible  plants  and  animals, 
but  each  species  has  its  own  specific  char- 
acters, making  it  as  unlike  other  bacteria 
as  any  two  living  things  can  be,  for  exam- 
ple, a  horse  and  a  camel.  A  typhoid 
bacillus  can  by  no  possibility  become  an 
influenza  bacillus,  nor  that  in  turn  a  lep- 
rosy bacillus.  Each  species  presents  a 
multitude  of  its  own  distinguishing  feat- 
ures, as  the  following  facts  demonstrate. 

Thus,  though  it  may  seem  odd  to  speak 
of  size  as  a  feature  among  microscopic  liv- 
ing things,  yet  they  actually  do  vary  in  this 
respect  as  much  as  visible  forms  do.  The 
bacillus  of  anthrax  is  as  much  larger  than 
an  influenza  bacillus  as  a  cat  is  larger  than 


MICRO-ORGANISMS 

a  mouse.  But  the  influenza  organism  is  a 
magnate  compared  with  the  yellow  fever 
agent,  for  this  is  so  small  that  not  one  of 
our  wonderful  microscopes  has  yet  caught 
sight  of  it,  and  that  this  is  due  to  its  al- 
most inconceivable  minuteness  is  shown  by 
its  passing  readily  through  the  pores  of  a 
Berkeley  porcelain  filter  which  stop  the 
larger  bodied  organisms  of  smallpox. 

But  the  difference  in  size  is  a  minor  mat- 
ter compared  with  the  great  contrasts  in 
vital  properties  between  the  various  spe- 
cies of  these  unicellular  forms.  A  tuber- 
cle bacillus  is  in  every  respect  wholly  un- 
like the  bacillus  of  the  bubonic  plague. 
The  first  generally  takes  months  or  years 
before  it  completes  its  work,  while  the 
other  is  never  chronic,  but  runs  its  course 
in  a  few  days.  They  differ  as  much  also 
in  their  chemical  composition  and  in  the 
chemical  accompaniments  of  their  growth 
on  non-living  media.  Again,  some  bacilli 
61 


WHAT   IS   PHYSICAL   LIFE 

are  non-motile,  or  can  scarcely  be  said  to 
move  at  all,  but  the  cholera  vibrio  squirms 
so  incessantly  that  no  snapshot  of  it  can 
be  taken,  all  its  micro-photographs  being 
blurred  because  it  will  not  keep  still. 
Meantime,  each  of  these  agents  kills  its 
victims  in  wholly  dissimilar  ways.  Some 
of  them  will  attack  the  same  person  only 
once,  while  others  find  a  previous  attack 
makes  another  all  the  easier.  And  so  we 
might  go  on  enumerating  many  other  ab- 
solute and  fixed  characteristics  which  dis- 
tinguish these  unicellular  forms  of  life 
from  one  another,  but  enough  has  already 
been  adduced  to  establish  the  fact  that  no 
forms  of  life  anywhere  are  so  individual 
and  specific  in  their  kinds  as  the  unicellular 
forms.  x 

In  this  respect  they  markedly  differ 
from  all  other  plants  and  animals.  In  the 
unicellular  forms  but  few  and  relatively  in- 
complete variations  occur,  such  as  between 


MICRO-ORGANISMS 

the  avian,  the  bovine,  and  the  human  varie- 
ties of  tubercle  bacilli.  ,But  these  are  so 
little  removed  from  one  another  that  their 
title  to  distinct  species  is  still  doubtful. 
The  same  may  be  said  of  the  colon  group, 
to  which  the  typhoid  bacillus  belongs. 
More  can  be  said  of  the  changes  in  the 
variola  agent  in  vaccinia  by  change  in  its 
soil  or  medium  of  growth.  When  changes 
are  artificially  produced  in  them  by  alter- 
ing the  medium  or  soil  in  which  they  grow, 
no  new  species  is  thus  formed,  for  they 
either  die  out  or  revert  to  their  original 
characters  so  soon  as  their  original  native 
conditions  are  restored.  Hence,  no  per- 
manent and  general  modification  takes 
place  in  them,  as  in  visible  plant  forms  like 
the  botanical  family  of  the  solanacea?,  for 
example,  which  includes  such  divers  forms 
as  the  potato,  the  eggplant,  the  thorn  ap- 
ple or  stinkweed  growing  about  our  barn- 
yards, the  hyoscyamus,  and  the  belladonna 
63 


WHAT   IS   PHYSICAL   LIFE 

or  deadly  nightshade  vine.  That  excel- 
lent botanist,  however,  the  potato  bug,  if 
potato  vines  give  out,  at  once  turns  to  what 
eggplants  he  can  find,  and  those  failing, 
he  eats  the  stinkweed,  and  lastly  the  bella- 
donna vines. 

But  as  to  unchangeableness  we  may  say 
that  empires  have  risen  and  fallen,  great 
races  of  man  have  come  and  gone,  yet  the 
tubercle  bacillus  causes  in  us  the  same 
tuberculosis  which  Hippocrates  so  well  de- 
scribed, two  thousand  three  hundred  years 
ago,  and  some  think  that  Ebers'  Egyptian 
papyrus  alludes  to  tuberculous  ulcers  thir- 
teen hundred  years  before  Hippocrates. 
Had  Hippocrates  only  possessed  a  prop- 
erly equipped  laboratory  he  might  then 
have  identified  the  tubercle  bacillus  and 
distinguished  it  from  other  bacilli,  because 
it  takes  a  characteristic  stain  with  methy- 
lene  blue  made  faintly  alkaline  with  caustic 
potash,  and  it  contains  more  fat  than  any 
64 


MICRO-ORGANISMS 

other  bacillus.  .  .  .  Likewise  the  ba- 
cillus of  leprosy  has  come  down  the  same 
through  the  ages,  from  the  early  dynasties 
of  Egypt,  and  in  the  Book  of  Leviticus 
it  is  wisely  ordered  to  burn  the  plaster  of 
a  leper's  house.  In  the  sixth  chapter  of 
First  Samuel,  a  severe  epidemic  is  nar- 
rated as  having  occurred  among  the 
Philistines,  which  must  have  been  the 
bubonic  plague,  for  the  Philistines  are 
said  to  have  made,  in  order  to  appease 
their  gods,  golden  images  of  buboes  and 
of  rats;  for  the  term  mice,  in  the  English 
version,  represents  a  Hebrew  word  which 
included  both  mice  and  rats.  It  was  not 
till  more  than  three  thousand  years  had 
passed  that  the  Japanese  bacteriologist, 
Kitasato,  demonstrated  that  the  plague  is 
conveyed  to  human  beings  by  fleas  which 
have  bitten  rats  sick  with  the  plague. 
Smallpox  was  described  by  Chinese  phy- 
sicians more  than  a  thousand  years  ago, 


WHAT   IS    PHYSICAL   LIFE 

and  this  infection  continues  its  same  nefa- 
rious ways  till  now.  Yellow  fever  remains 
the  same  yellow  fever  in  every  respect  as 
the  first  historic  description  given  of  it. 

This  mention  of  smallpox  and  yellow 
fever  justifies  our  alluding  to  the  contrasts 
between  the  living  agents  of  these  two  in- 
fections, if  only  further  to  emphasize  the 
specific  differences  which  distinguish  them 
from  one  another.  The  yellow  fever  germ 
can  go  nowhere  except  as  his  mosquito 
nurse  carries  him.  Moreover,  he  cannot 
endure  the  slightest  touch  of  frost,  though 
that  may  not  be  fatal  to  his  mosquito. 
He  has  never  been  known  to  ascend  moun- 
tains. The  smallpox  agent,  on  the  other 
hand,  can  be  carried  by  anything,  as  was 
illustrated  on  one  occasion  by  an  official 
visit  of  mine  to  a  smallpox  hospital,  ac- 
companied by  a  confrere.  There  was  but 
one  smallpox  patient  in  the  building,  and 
we  were  careful  not  to  come  near  enough  to 
66 


MICRO-ORGANISMS 

touch  him.  We  then  proceeded  directly  to 
the  steamboat  waiting  for  us  on  the  East 
River,  which  at  that  time  was  filled  with 
floes  of  ice,  and  we  paced  the  deck  in  a 
biting  cold  wind,  hoping  thereby  to  disin- 
fect our  clothes.  After  a  two  miles'  trip 
we  landed,  when  my  colleague  took  his 
carriage  to  visit  a  woman  whom  he  had 
attended  a  few  days  before,  in  confine- 
ment, with  a  pair  of  twins.  Twelve  days 
afterwards  both  infants  broke  out  with 
smallpox,  to  the  consternation  of  the 
mother,  and  the  feigned  astonishment  of 
my  colleague. 

We  may  remark  in  passing  that  the  in- 
finitesimal size  of  the  agent  of  yellow  fever 
raises  the  question  how  much  of  that  sub- 
stance called  matter  is  necessary  to  make 
a  powerful  living  thing.  It  is  hard  to 
imagine  anything  more  effective  than  it 
in  the  work  it  does,  which  may  destroy 
in  a  few  hours  a  strong  man  in  the  prime 
67 


WHAT   IS   PHYSICAL   LIFE 

of  life,  not  because  it  is  a  chemical  poison, 
but  because  it  is  a  living  growth  belonging 
to  an  infection  historically  known  for  cen- 
turies. We  cannot  expect  therefore  that 
/  experimenters  will  soon  be  able  artificially 
to  make  life,  when  not  only  the  yellow 
fever  agent,  but  those  of  hydrophobia, 
rinderpest,  and  a  number  of  other  infec- 
tions of  cattle,  are  not  large  enough  to  be 
seen  by  any  microscope,  and  hence  are 
beyond  handling. 

We  have  shown  in  the  previous  chapter 
that  Reproduction  and  Heredity  are  the 
two  fundamental  factors  in  all  physical 
life,  and  how  impossible  it  is  to  find  any 
analogue  to  them  outside  the  domain  of 
life.  But  much  the  most  striking  illustra- 
tions of  both  great  reproductive  powers 
and  of  heredity  are  shown,  for  example,  in 
the  case  of  the  tubercle  bacillus.  His  term 
of  life,  instead  of  being,  as  with  us,  three- 
score years  and  ten,  is  only  from  twenty 


MICRO-ORGANISMS 
to  thirty  minutes,  but  he  can  have  17,000,- 
000  descendants  in  twenty-four  hours.* 
Now,  estimating  the  life  only  of  an  elderly 
tubercle  bacillus  at  thirty  minutes,  and 
then  calculating  how  many  generations  he 
goes  through  in  the  three  thousand  years 
since  we  have  made  his  acquaintance,  he 
has  traced  his  descent  through  5,450,000 
generations,  without  once  deviating  from 
the  venerable  type  with  which  he  began. 
This  only  illustrates  afresh  what  a  complex 
and  absolutely  unique  thing  life  is.  When 
lately  a  new  star  suddenly  flashed  in  the 
heavens  and  after  a  time  faded  away, 
astronomers  agreed  that  the  origin  of  this 
latest  "  Nova  "  was  from  the  collision  of 
separate  stars  or  of  streams  of  meteorites, 
which,  judging  by  the  rate  at  which  light 
travels,  probably  took  place  while  Sol- 
omon's Temple  was  in  building.  But  the 
problem  of  the  origin  of  a  star  is  simple 

*  Muir  and  Ritchie,  Manual  of  Bacteriology,  p.  6. 


WHAT   IS   PHYSICAL   LIFE 

enough  compared  with  that  of  one  bac- 
terium. 

A  fact  which  overshadows  all  others 
about  unicellular  forms  was  naturally  not 
suspected  until  after  microscopes  were 
made.  But  it  is  now  revealed  that  this 
once  invisible  world  is  much  the  largest 
division  of  the  living  kingdom,  exceeding  in 
actual  bulk  all  visible  plants  and  animals 
put  together.  To  illustrate  their  relative 
extent  we  might  liken  the  unicellular  king- 
dom of  life  to  a  lake,  that  of  all  visible 
plants  to  a  pond,  and  that  of  all  animals 
to  a  pool.  This  is  because  all  visible  plants 
and  animals  are  necessarily  local — even  a 
tiny  blade  of  grass  is  not  found  everywhere 
—while  among  the  unicellular  forms  the 
bacteria  alone  may  be  said  to  be  every- 
where, on  everything  and  in  everything, 
whether  in  earth,  water,  or  air.  Nor,  as 
we  shall  see,  are  they  there  in  vain.  Sim- 
ply to  illustrate  this  vitally  important 
70 


MICRO-ORGANISMS 

fact,  we  may  dwell  on  the  scene  at  a  sur- 
geon's operating  table  in  one  of  our  mod- 
ern hospitals. 

The  surgeon  himself  and  all  his  staff 
are  dressed  like  the  old  priests  of  Solo- 
mon's Temple,  wearing  white  caps  and 
gowns,  with  the  nurses  standing  around 
like  priestesses  all  in  spotless  white,  while 
every  one  about  the  table  has  gone  through 
as  many  ablutions  as  befits  the  occasion 
of  a  bloody  sacrifice  under  the  auspices  of 
the  immaculate  Goddess  of  Cleanliness. 
A  minute  and  elaborate  ritual  has  been 
observed  of  sterilizing  everything — towels, 
threads,  needles,  forceps,  instruments,  and 
what  not,  while  the  floor  itself  is  made  of 
glass  or  glazed  tiles,  rather  than  of  wood. 
The  surgeon  himself  does  not  venture  to 
cut  the  victim  till  he  has  put  on  his  steril- 
ized gloves,  because  he  cannot  possibly 
clean  his  own  fingers  enough.  Should  any 
onlooker  take  his  hand  out  of  his  pocket  to 
71 


WHAT   IS   PHYSICAL   LIFE 

reach  for  the  gaping  wound  he  would  be 
ejected  instanter  for  spoiling  the  whole 
performance  with  his  defiling  touch. 

Every  item  and  detail  in  the  foregoing 
description  simply  illustrates  how  nothing 
escapes  being  covered  with  these  unicellu- 
lar micro-organisms. 

But  instead  of  associating  bacteria,  as 
many  do,  with  nothing  but  surgery  or  dis- 
ease, we  cannot  but  infer  that  such  a  pre- 
ponderating realm  of  life  as  that  of  the 
micro-organisms  must  have  a  correspond- 
ing influence  on  the  rest  of  the  living  king- 
dom. And  so  indeed  it  has,  because,  were 
it  not  for  the  bacteria  alone,  all  visible 
plants  or  animals  would  soon  cease  to  ex- 
ist. Thus  no  animal  or  plant  spontane- 
ously decomposes  after  it  dies,  any  more 
(than  do  stones  or  rocks.  Every  tree  which 
falls  in  a  forest  and  the  body  of  every 
foeast  dead  in  the  field,  would  stay  there 
fcut  for  bacteria.  So  soon  as  any  living 
72 


MICRO-ORGANISMS 

thing  gives  up  its  life,  bacteria  immediately 
set  to  work  upon  its  remains  and  forth- 
with resolve  them  into  their  original  chemi- 
cal elements.  We  can  prevent  all  this  by 
means  which  keep  bacteria  quiet,  as  when 
we  preserve  meats  and  vegetables  with 
certain  varieties  of  carbolic  acid  called 
spices,  for  all  spices  can  be  made  artifi- 
cially out  of  coal  tar.  Or  we  may  use  na- 
ture's efficient  germicide,  ice.  Thus  Nature 
has  a  great  cold-storage  plant  in  the  tun- 
dras of  Siberia,  where  the  carcasses  of  big 
mammoths  have  lain  for  unnumbered  cen- 
turies with  their  bodies  so  well  preserved 
that  dogs  at  once  help  themselves  to  them 
when  they  are  dug  out,  and  what  the  dogs 
leave  the  bacteria  at  once  dispose  of. 

Geologists  tell  us  that,  as  it  is,  entire 
strata  of  rocks  on  the  earth's  surface  are 
largely  made  up  of  the  skeletons  of  once 
living  forms.  Hence  if  it  were  not  for 
bacteria,  corpses  would  soon  pile  higher 
73 


WHAT   IS   PHYSICAL  LIFE 

than  the  Andes,  and  the  earth  would  be 
choked  with  its  own  dead.  In  other  words, 
bacteria  keep  life  going  by  removing  the 
bodies  of  each  generation  to  make  room 
for  the  next.  Thus  life  here  begins  with 
microbes  and  ends  with  them.  In  this 
sense,  therefore,  bacteria  are  indispensable. 
We  could  not  do  without  their  post- 
mortem activities. 

On  the  other  hand,  certain  kinds  of  bac- 
teria can  be  made  directly  beneficial  to 
the  living  human  world  by  materially  in- 
creasing its  food  supply.  Though  no  one 
would  think  of  cultivating  protozoa,  yet 
these  particular  bacteria  being  vegetables 
we  can  raise  profitable  crops  of  them,  so 
that  some  are  now  actually  put  out  for 
sale  at  two  dollars  a  small  bottle. 

These  valuable  bacteria  were  first  dis- 
covered in  little  excrescences  resembling 
warts  on  the  rootlets  of  leguminous  plants 
such  as  beans,  peas,  and  clover,  and  were 
74 


MICRO-ORGANISMS 

first  mistaken  as -signs  of  the  plants  being 
diseased.  Further  investigation  proved 
that  they  were  caused  by  colonies  of  bac- 
teria which  had  the  invaluable  property 
of  what  is  termed  "  fixing  "  the  free  nitro- 
gen of  the  air.  Nitrogen  is  a  most  im- 
portant ingredient  in  all  real  foods, 
whether  meat  or  bread,  but  though  three- 
fifths  of  the  air  is  composed  of  nitrogen, 
none  of  this  vast  supply  can  be  used  for 
food  any  more  than  the  water  of  oceans 
can  be  used  for  drink.  Cereals  like  wheat 
can  get  the  nitrogen  for  their  seeds  only 
in  the  small  quantity  and  roundabout 
ways  afforded  by  decomposing  animal 
secretions  or  other  decaying  organic 
matter.  Hence  the  high  price  of  manure 
per  load. 

Meantime  bread-eaters  are  increasing  at 

such  a  rate  that  according  to  Sir  William 

Crookes,  much  too  soon  for  comfort,  there 

will  not  be  manure  enough,  nor  any  other 

75 


WHAT   IS   PHYSICAL   LIFE 

supply  of  available  nitrogen  to  feed  the 
nations.  The  store  of  Chili  saltpetre, 
which  was  originally  a  vast  deposit  of 
guano,  is  being  reduced  at  a  disquieting 
rate,  and  the  plan  of  fixing  air  nitrogen  by 
electricity,  though  promising,  is  still  ex- 
pensive. It  is  therefore  welcome  news  to 
hear  that  these  benevolent  hordes  of  bac- 
teria have  been  discovered  in  the  very  act 
of  "  fixing  "  nitrogen,  and  moreover  just 
where  it  is  most  wanted,  viz.,  on  the  root- 
lets of  plants.  Professor  Hilgard  of  the 
University  of  California,  in  his  treatise  on 
Soils,  p.  155,  says  that  seeds  sown  after 
they  have  been  inoculated  with  the  pur- 
chased bacteria  at  the  cost  of  two  dollars 
an  acre,  can  add  thirty  to  forty  dollars' 
worth  of  nitrogen  more  and  better  than  the 
nitrogen  in  two  tons  of  a  chemical  fertilizer 
such  as  the  Chili  saltpetre. 

Professor  Whitney  of  the  United  States 
Department  of  Agriculture  goes  so  far 
76 


MICRO-ORGANISMS 

as  to  say  that  it  makes  but  little  difference 
what  the  soil  is,  for  bacteria  of  the  proper 
sort  will  make  it  fertile,  and  that  the  fu- 
ture of  agriculture  will  be  bound  up  in  the  / 
application  of  the  science  of  bacteriology. ' 
This  science  is  yet  in  its  infancy,  and  it  is 
now  difficult  to  gauge  the  extent  of  its 
possible  advantageous  developments.  But 
already  we  know  that  trees  need  bacteria 
to  prepare  their  food  for  them,  and  that 
America  will  be  as  treeless  as  Greece  and 
Palestine  now  are,  if  we  do  not  put  a  stop 
to  the  washing  away  of  the  bacteria-laden 
soil  by  the  wholesale  cutting  off  of  our 
forests. 

The  Protozoa  are,  if  anything,  of  more 
ancient  and  unvarying  lineage  than  the 
bacteria.  So  far  as  we  are  concerned, 
those  of  them  which  cause  disease  are  more 
to  be  dreaded  than  disease-producing  bac- 
teria. Their  chief  mode  of  entrance  into 
the  bodies  of  animals  is  by  the  bites  of  in- 
77 


WHAT   IS   PHYSICAL  LIFE 

sects.  Thus  the  organism  of  ague  or  ma- 
larial fever,  and  the  yellow  fever  thing, 
come  through  hypodermic  injection  into 
us  by  two  separate  varieties  of  mosquitoes. 
None  of  the  one  hundred  and  twenty-three 
remaining  varieties  of  mosquitoes  do  more 
than  sing  and  sting.  The  terribly  mortal 
,  disease  of  Eastern  India,  called  Kala  azar, 
which  destroys  ninety-eight  per  cent,  of 
those  attacked,  comes  by  the  bites  of  bed- 
bugs. But  a  special  interest  attaches  to 
the  fatal  Sleeping  Sickness  of  Africa,  as 
that  is  due  to  the  bite  of  the  tsetze  fly, 
which  harbors  in  its  mouth  species  of  pro- 
tozoa called  trympanosomes.  This  tsetze 
fly  is  responsible  not  only  for  fearful  hu- 
man epidemics  but  for  the  destruction  of 
vast  numbers  of  cattle,  and  also  for  the 
deaths  of  some  of  the  largest  forms  of 
wild  game  in  Africa.  It  is  not  improbable 
that  many  of  the  earth's  large  animals  now 
extinct  may  have  been  killed  off  by  similar 
78 


MICRO-ORGANISMS 

means,  for  Professor  A.  D.  Cockerell  of 
the  University  of  Colorado  has  found  fos- 
sil tsetze  flies  in  the  Miocene  strata  of 
Colorado,  and  Professor  H.  F.  Osborn  of 
Columbia  University  has  made  a  similar 
discovery  in  the  tertiary  strata  of  the  same 
region.  And  so  we  will  find  the  evidence 
accumulating  that  "  the  everlasting  hills  " 
themselves  will  not  last  nor  be  as  abiding 
or  unchangeable  as  are  many  unicellular 
forms  of  life. 

This  unchangeableness  of  certain  forms 
of  life  through  unimaginable  antiquity  is 
impressively  illustrated  by  those  unicellu- 
lar algee  called  Diatoms,  whose  survival 
may  be  largely  due  to  the  indestructible 
case  of  flint  which  each  individual  of  them 
forms  about  itself.  Here  we  find  that  in- 
scrutable, sticky  thing  called  protoplasm 
fashioning  coverings  for  itself  of  the  most 
varied  and  exquisite  patterns  in  Nature 
made  out  of  pure  silex,  some  in  spheres, 
79 


WHAT   IS   PHYSICAL  LIFE 

others  in  squares,  others  in  triangles, 
others  in  spindles  or  veritable  microscopic 
canoes,  many  of  them  with  most  beautiful 
colors,  and  all  with  delicate  lines  coursing 
over  them.  As  the  powers  of  great  tele- 
scopes have  been  rated  according  to  their 
resolving  certain  nebulas  into  distinct  stars, 
so  the  powers  of  microscopes  have  been 
judged  according  to  their  ability  to  re- 
solve the  lines  on  certain  diatoms  into 
linear  dots,  as  in  a  copperplate  engraving. 
But  whole  strata  of  rocks  have  been  found 
in  different  parts  of  the  world  made  up 
chiefly  of  the  skeletons  of  diatoms.  One 
such  near  Richmond,  Virginia,  is  of  much 
commercial  importance  for  making  pol- 
ishing powders,  and  is  even  used  in  the 
manufacture  of  dynamite.  But  I  have 
found  in  the  sediment  of  a  pool  in  our 
Central  Park  a  number  of  the  same  species 
of  diatoms  which  are  taken  out  of  rocks 
of  the  Cretaceous  Period!  And  these  liv- 
80 


MICRO-ORGANISMS 

ing  things  are  still  at  their  proper  busi- 
ness the  world  over,  for  the  bases  of  the 
high  walls  of  ice  which  the  sea  washes 
around  the  great  Antarctic  continent  are 
brown  with  them. 

But  for  pure  antiquity  and  unmitigated 
conservatism  in  keeping  to  old  ways,  those 
living  things  called  Foraminifera  take  the 
palm.  But  for  them  geology  would  be 
only  a  physical  science,  such  as  a  professor 
of  it  would  find  now  on  the  dry,  lifeless 
Moon.  The  foraminifera,  instead  of 
choosing  flint  to  clothe  themselves  withal, 
have  taken  for  that  purpose  the  carbonate 
of  lime  which  abounds  in  sea  water,  with 
the  result  that  a  great  part  of  the  crust 
of  the  globe  has  been  constructed  by  them 
in  the  form  of  massive  strata  of  lime- 
stone, chalk  cliffs  and  deposits,  great  both 
in  thickness  and  in  extent.  It  is  doubtful 
indeed  if  there  be  any  limestone  which  does 
not  owe  its  origin  to  these  organisms,  be- 
81 


WHAT   IS   PHYSICAL   LIFE 

cause  marbles  which  show  no  traces  of 
them  prove  on  examination  to  have  been 
subjected  to  far  fiercer  heat  than  that 
which  would  consume  the  remains  of  or- 
ganisms in  kiln-baked  brick.  This  heat 
may  have  been  engendered  in  many  cases 
by  the  violent  crumpling  up  of  rocky 
strata  during  great  movements  of  the 
earth  crust,  thus  changing  the  original 
limestone  deposits  into  veins  of  marble. 

But  elsewhere  limestone  proves  on  ex- 
amination to  be  a  very  curious  thing,  full 
of  minute  holes  which  are  really  where  lit- 
tle canals  have  been  cut  across,  and  which 
canals  cannot  possibly  be  of  mechanical 
origin,  for  no  mineral  grains  can  be  made 
to  take  such  lines.  Instead  it  is  now 
demonstrated  that  it  is  all  done  by  an  ani- 
mal organism  which,  when  first  identified, 
was  imagined  to  fulfil  all  the  conditions  for 
a  beginning  of  unorganized  life,  and  there- 
fore was  called  sarcode.  A  particle  of  this 


MICRO-ORGANISMS 

jelly-like  sarcode  is  observed  in  living 
foraminifera  to  throw  out  long  threads 
which,  however,  are  soon  delicately  en- 
cased by  carbonate  of  lime,  and  as  this 
shell  remains  after  the  animal  which  made 
it  dies,  so  it  stays  as  a  slender  tube  of  stone, 
thus  explaining  both  the  canals  and  the 
holes  through  which  the  sarcode  threads 
exude,  and  from  whence  the  name  fora- 
minefera.  It  has  been  demonstrated,  how- 
ever, by  Oscar  Hertwig  and  by  other  com- 
petent observers  that  this  apparently  sim- 
ple sarcode  contains  that  great  official,  the 
Nucleus,  with  all  his  high  prerogatives, 
to  whose  agency  must  be  attributed  the  re- 
markable constructive  powers  of  these  or- 
ganisms. Some  of  their  kinds  live  in  fresh 
water  where  they,  however,  have  no  lime 
to  work  with,  but  their  protoplasm  is 
equal  to  the  occasion,  for  they  then  make 
an  envelope  of  Chitin,  a  substance  which  is 
the  animal  analogue  of  vegetable  cellulose. 
83 


WHAT   IS    PHYSICAL   LIFE 

Foraminifera  therefore  are  virtually  uni- 
cellular, though  with  the  important  differ- 
ence that  they  have  no  cell  wall.  Instead 
their  protruded  threads  of  protoplasm 
wherever  they  meet  start  a  new  organism 
of  their  kind  and  thus  may  make  a  collec- 
tion of  relatively  great  size. 

We  reproduce  a  plate  here  from  Dr. 
W.  B.  Carpenter's  article  in  the  Encyclo- 
pcedia  Britannica  on  the  Foraminifera,  of 
the  forms  produced  by  them  as  they  are 
found  in  limestones,  which  shows  at  a 
glance  that  they  can  no  more  be  accident- 
ally thrown  together  thus  than  a  piece  of 
printed  newspaper  can  spontaneously 
come  into  existence  anywhere.  The  bit  of 
newspaper  may  tell  something  about  the 
earthquake  of  Messina,  but  the  limestone 
inscription  by  the  foramimfera  may  as 
plainly  tell  a  story  of  the  doings  of  life 
and  of  nothing  but  life,  some  forty  million 
years  ago. 

84 


FORMS  OF  FORAMINIFERA 


MICRO-ORGANISMS 

One  needs,  however,  first  to  take  some 
exercises  in  thought  expansion  before  this 
story  can  be  fully  appreciated.  Limestone 
strata,  as  we  have  said,  make  up  a  great 
part  of  the  crust  of  the  globe.  But  when 
we  study  how  the  strata  succeeded  one 
another  in  time,  we  become  staggered  with 
the  signs  of  the  presence  of  the  Eocene 
Canadense  in  the  limestone  underlying 
the  Laurentian  rocks.  Whole  mountain 
ranges  then  towered  above  the  sea  and 
sank  again;  sea  became  land  and  land  sea; 
climates  changed  from  warm  to  cold  and 
back  again;  environment  changed  and 
changed,  and  yet  these  foraminifera  are 
still  at  their  ancient  doings  the  same  as 
ever,  so  that  if  the  present  ocean  bed  were 
raised  as  in  former  times,  new  chalk  cliffs 
would  appear  as  of  old.  As  Dr.  Carpen- 
ter says,  these  foraminifera  as  long  ante- 
dated the  first  fossils  of  multicellular 
form  in  the  Lower  Cambrian  as  these 
85 


WHAT   IS    PHYSICAL   LIFE 

last  antedate  us.  Therefore  untold  mil- 
lions of  years  of  active  unicellular  life 
passed  before  the  time  came  for  a  single 
multicellular  organism  to  come  into  being. 
Having  reviewed  some  of  the  aspects 
of  the  unicellular  forms  of  the  living  king- 
dom, it  is  now  time  to  consider  their  rela- 
tions to  our  subject  of  the  origin  and  na- 
ture of  physical  life.  We  may  ask: 

I.  What  is  the  answer  to  the  question, 
How  did  life  begin  on  this  globe,  and  in 
what  form  or  forms?    The  answer  is  that 
it  did  not  begin  in  an  accidentally  formed 
jelly,  for  such  an  event  never  happened  in 
millions  upon  millions  of  years  and  hence 
cannot  happen  now,  for  not  a  single  bacil- 
lus, nor  protozoon,  nor  diatom,  nor  any 
foraminifera  can  now  be  made  by  any- 
body. 

II.  This  primeval  living  matter  when  it 
came  into  existence  did  not  forthwith  be- 
gin to  vary  in  all  directions,  because  these 


MICRO-ORGANISMS 

old  unicellular  things  vary  the  least  of 
anything  on  earth.  Mountains  may 
change,  but  not  diatoms  nor  protozoa. 

III.  They  were  neither  created  nor 
modified  by  their  environment,  because  all 
conceivable  changes  of  environment  have 
passed  over  them  in  their  long  story  with- 
out ever  having  made  them  at  all  different 
from  what  they  are  now.  Some  of  their 
species  died  out,  perhaps  of  pure  age,  but 
not  from  destructive  environment,  because 
those  forms  which  still  exist  are  neither 
their  survivors  nor  successors,  but  can  be 
found  to  have  been  living  and  multiplying 
and  acting  through  all  the  past  ages. 

How,  therefore,  is  all  this  greatest  story 
of  physical  life  to  be  accounted  for?  The 
answer  is  one  which  will  have  to  be  re- 
peated more  than  once  as  we  proceed, 
namely,  that  we  do  not  know,  nor  appar- 
ently does  anybody  else  know.  It  is  only 
uninstructed  impatience  which  will  assert 
87 


WHAT   IS    PHYSICAL   LIFE 

that  more  than  a  tithe  of  the  laws  of  life 
have  been  as  yet  thoroughly  discovered  and 
known. 

Because  it  was  not  from  lack  of  sus- 
ceptibility on  the  part  of  unicellular  or- 
ganisms to  every  alleged  influence  of  en- 
vironment that  their  unchangeableness 
was  due,  for  their  living  forms  now  show 
as  much  sensitiveness  to  such  influences  as 
do  other  living  forms,  and  hence  presum- 
ably they  always  have  done  so.  Among 
bacteria,  for  example,  a  severe  struggle 
is  always  going  on  between  different 
kinds  for  possession  of  the  field.  One  of 
the  greatest  difficulties  of  the  bacteriol- 
ogist, when  he  tries  to  isolate  any  one  form 
on  his  culture  medium,  is  to  prevent  it  from 
being  invaded  by  other  bacteria  which  soon 
exterminate  his  chosen  kind.  It  is  the 
word,  contamination,  which  vexes  this  sci- 
entific experimenter's  soul,  more  than  that 
of  any  gardener  when  he  sees  weeds  multi- 
88 


MICRO-ORGANISMS 

plying  in  his  carefully  tended  beds.  Like- 
wise our  great  disinfectants,  fresh  air,  sun- 
light, and  washing,  all  act  by  destroying 
or  weakening  bacteria  by  causing  changes 
in  their  environment  unfavorable  to  their 
growth.  Even  the  foraminifera  find  the 
Arctic  seas  too  cold  for  them.  But  not- 
withstanding all  this  susceptibility  to  en- 
vironment they  hold  on.  The  tubercle 
bacillus,  though  only  seven  minutes'  ex- 
posure to  sunlight  kills  him,  yet  has  re- 
mained the  same  bacillus  for  thousands  of 
years,  nor  once  shown  a  fancy  to  become 
an  anthrax  bacillus  nor  a  cholera  vibrio, 
nor  anything  else  but  a  tubercle  bacillus. 
It  must  be  some  unknown  power  or  prin- 
ciple of  life  which  first  gave  origin  to  these 
living  things  and  by  which  they  remain  the 
same  to-day,  yesterday,  and  for  the  future. 
This  power  or  principle  of  life  we  can  now 
only  designate  by  the  letter  X,  and  many 
more  such  Xs  we  are  yet  to  encounter. 


WHAT   IS    PHYSICAL   LIFE 

Meantime,  this  great  division  of  the  liv- 
ing kingdom  still  exists  as  great  as  ever, 
and  proportionately  great  in  its  influence 
upon  the  life  of  all  present  and  more  re- 
cent living  things,  ourselves  included.  In 
our  next  chapter  we  shall  see  that  we  live 
here  only  on  temporary  sufferance  by  the 
unicellular  things,  which  sooner  or  later 
will  put  an  end  to  our  earthly  existence. 
This  subject,  therefore,  becomes  a  very 
practical  one  for  us,  multicellular  beings, 
as  all  our  Health  Officials  will  testify. 

On  the  other  hand,  we  cannot  but  con- 
sider it  strange  that  this  greatest  of  the 
divisions  of  the  living  kingdom  is  wholly 
ignored  by  writers  on  biology.  Darwin 
himself  never  once  referred  to  it,  though 
as  his  great  work  had  for  its  title  the 
Origin  of  Species,  he  would  have  found 
better  examples  of  settled  and  definite 
species  among  the  bacteria  alone  than  he 
would  have  found  anywheie  else.  This 
90 


MICRO-ORGANISMS 

omission  of  the  first  and  longest  chapter  in 
the  history  of  life  on  earth  is  parallel  to 
Victor  Hugo's  views  on  the  people,  in- 
stitutions, and  laws  of  Great  Britain  based 
upon  his  observations  of  the  inhabitants  of 
the  Channel  Islands,  Jersey,  and  Guern- 
sey, because  they  spoke  French! 

Considering  what  the  principles  of  his- 
tory are,  this  usual  beginning  by  biologists 
of  the  story  of  life  on  earth  with  the  late 
appearance  of  the  multicellular  forms,  is 
like  a  philosophical  history  of  the  great 
American  Civil  War  opening  with  the 
year  1861,  without  a  single  reference  to 
any  of  those  antecedents  which  profoundly 
influenced  both  the  inception  and  the 
course  of  that  conflict. 

But  the  mention  of  the  tubercle  bacillus 
alone  suffices  to  illustrate  the  importance 
of  the  relation  of  this  great  kingdom  of 
unicellular  life  to  us.  For  ages  upon  ages 
this  mighty  micro-organism  has  waged 
91 


WHAT   IS   PHYSICAL  LIFE 

a  cruel,  destructive  war  upon  the  human 
race.  After  fifty  years  of  observation  and 
study  of  its  ghastly  doings,  I  can  say  that 
I  would  rather  have  the  power  to  cause  the 
tears  shed  on  its  account  to  cease  than  to 
be  the  greatest  official  or  the  greatest 
owner  on  the  earth.  Meantime  its  abso- 
lutely specific  properties,  which  remain  un- 
changed through  the  centuries,  show  that  a 
physico-chemical  explanation  of  the  origin 
of  this  ancient  foe  can  be  expected  only 
by  uninstructed  intellects. 


CHAPTER   IV 

THE    METAZOA,   OR    THE   MULTICELLTJLAR   FORMS 
OP    LIFE 

UNLIKE  the  Unicellular  department  of 
life,  whose  chief  characteristic  is  fixity, 
that  of  the  Metazoa  is  development.  This 
development  is  not  alone  into  a  great  vari- 
ety of  forms,  but  much  more  into  a  pro- 
gressive elevation  in  function,  or  in  the 
kind  of  work  which  is  performed.  Thus 
connective  tissue  cells,  whose  working  is 
purely  mechanical,  are  inferior  to  muscle 
cells,  whose  chief  function  is  to  pull  and 
then  to  relax,  for  the  relations  of  muscles 
to  animal  heat  do  not  concern  us  now. 
But  this  muscle  function  of  contraction 
and  relaxation  is  simple  compared  with 
the  functions  of  a  collection  of  nerve  cells. 
As  function,  however,  is  a  gauge  of  life, 
93 


WHAT   IS   PHYSICAL   LIFE 

we  may  say  that  muscle  cells  are  much 
less  alive  than  the  nerve  cells  in  the  spinal 
cord,  and  these  in  turn  much  less  alive  than 
nerve  cells  in  the  brain. 

But  what  is  meant  by  the  term,  alive? 
It  is  altogether  too  great  a  word  to  be 
defined.  An  insect  is  alive,  and  a  stone  is 
not.  A  little  spider  can  make  a  web,  which 
nothing  however  great  if  it  is  not  alive  can 
do.  Only  that  which  is  alive  can  "  make  " 
anything.  Hence  in  the  metazoa  one  form 
is  more  alive  than  the  other  below  it,  and  so 
on  through  the  whole  series  from  a  simple 
living  growth  to  living  movement,  and 
then  on  to  sensation,  thought,  and  purpose. 

But  this  development  of  the  metazoa 
was  very  slow  in  its  course,  the  slowest, 
greatest,  and  last  of  all  being  nervous  de- 
velopment. We  might  almost  liken  it  to  a 
prolonged  course  of  education,  each  suc- 
ceeding class  learning  what  its  predecessor 
had,  and  then  adding  to  it. 
94 


THE    METAZOA 

It  is  this  great  feature  of  progressive 
development  which  has  led  biologists,  from 
Darwin  down,  to  restrict  their  attention 
to  the  metazoa.  As  we  have  already  dis- 
cussed the  various  theories  propounded  as 
explanatory  of  the  course  of  development, 
we  need  not  recapitulate  them  here.  But 
a  great  and  hitherto  insuperable  diffi- 
culty inexorably  and  equally  attends  all 
these  speculators  from  the  very  start.  If 
they  had  only  full-grown  plants  and  ani- 
mals to  deal  with,  the  task  would  be  com- 
paratively easy.  But,  as  we  have  seen, 
each  metazoan  form  of  life  begins  as  a 
single  microscopic  cell,  which  is  then  more 
itself  and  nothing  but  itself  than  it  will 
ever  be  afterward.  In  other  words  it  looks 
at  first  altogether  like  one  of  those  eternal 
unicellular  things  which  never  change  nor 
develop  for  millions  of  years.  But  that 
which  makes  the  vast  difference  between 
this  metazoan  unicellular  thing  and  the 
95 


WHAT   IS   PHYSICAL   LIFE 

old  unicellular  things  must  all  depend  on 
the  internal  organization  of  its  micro- 
scopic body.  There  is  no  way  to  get  round 
that  fact.  The  whole  hereditary  past 
and  the  whole  developmental  future, 
down  to  its  smallest  details,  are  together 
locked  up  in  that  minute  speck  of  living 
matter. 

The  imagination  itself  refuses  to  picture 
at  this  stage  what  the  internal  organization 
of  this  wonderful  little  dot  must  be,  and 
asks  to  wait  till  its  subsequent  behavior 
can  be  observed.  Accordingly,  the  first 
thing  noted  about  this  metazoic  cell  is  that 
instead  of  reproducing  its  like  in  all  par- 
ticulars as  formerly,  it  divides  into  two 
cells,  and  these  then  into  four,  and  these 
into  eight,  and  these  again  into  sixteen, 
and  so  on  into  an  indefinite  number  of 
divisions. 

But  now  comes  the  greatest  of  all  the 
mysteries  of  physical  life,  to  which  is 
96 


THE    METAZOA 

due  the  difference  between  the  old  order  of 
things  and  the  new.  Multiplication  of 
cells,  all  with  fixed  hereditary  and  specific 
properties,  was  a  great  feature  of  the  old 
order,  but  each  cell  was  then  an  independ- 
ent and  finished  living  thing.  In  the  meta- 
zoa,  on  the  other  hand,  not  independence 
but  interdependence  of  cells  is  the  abso- 
lute law.  Their  cells  are  never  free  unless 
they  are  being  cast  out  of  the  community. 
A  mere  indefinite  multiplication  of  their 
cells,  in  which  they  are  said  to  proliferate 
indiscriminately,  or  even  a  sign  of  weaken- 
ing of  their  reciprocal  interdependence, 
signifies  disease  and  death.  All  their  cells 
instead  are  held  together  by  a  wonderful 
something  which  "  organizes "  their  de- 
velopment along  very  definite  lines.  Thus 
in  the  higher  animals  after  the  dividing 
but  adhering  cells  have  come  to  resemble  a 
mulberry  in  appearance,  a  division  into 
three  layers  soon  appears.  From  the  first 
97 


WHAT   IS    PHYSICAL   LIFE 

layer  develop  in  time,  by  various  inf old- 
ings,  the  nervous  and  some  skin  tissues; 
from  the  second  the  connective  tissue,  the 
muscles,  blood-vessels,  and  bones;  and 
from  the  third  the  lining  of  the  alimentary 
canal  and  its  associated  viscera,  etc.  If  the 
further  steps  of  development  of  organs 
out  of  these  primary  divisions  had  not 
been  carefully  followed,  no  one  would 
dream  what  the  word  "  differentiation  " 
used  by  biologists  to  denote  the  process, 
means.  It  means  that  each  cell,  as  growth 
goes  on,  takes  its  place  where  it  ought  to, 
in  other  words  along  predetermined  lines. 
Every  one  of  the  many  and  diverse  tissues, 
for  example,  which  make  up  an  eye,  fit 
their  places  as  parts  of  an  eye  and  not  of 
an  ear.  And  so  of  the  component  parts  of 
all  the  other  organs.  Fitness  local,  fitness 
general,  fitness  universal  meets  us  at  every 
turn,  and  so  sure  is  this  interdependence 
and  interrelation  of  parts  that  an  anato- 
98 


THE   METAZOA 

mist  can  often  reconstruct  an  animal  from 
a  single  tooth. 

All  these  internal  adjustments  present 
at  last  an  infinitely  more  complex  and 
complete  mechanism  than  the  watch  which 
Paley  instanced  as  an  illustration  of  in- 
telligent design  in  the  making.  Paley's 
argument,  however,  in  our  times  has  heen 
quite  displaced  by  the  great  conception  of 
mechanical  development,  or  as  it  is  called, 
Evolution,  a  conception  which  while  true 
enough  in  principle  is  so  far  wholly  im- 
provable in  details.  Evolution  through 
descent  of  the  later  from  earlier  forms  is 
believed  in  by  all  biologists,  however  di- 
verse their  opinions  about  what  the  process 
of  evolution  itself  was.  But  here  comes 
the  great  difficulty,  namely,  that  general 
descent  does  not  afford  the  least  insight 
into  individual  descent.  The  real  problem 
of  life,  therefore,  is  how  the  microscopic 
single  cell,  with  which  each  individual 
99 


WHAT   IS   PHYSICAL   LIFE 

among  the  metazoa  begins,  should  virtu- 
ally contain  not  only  all  the  structural 
peculiarities  of  the  body  of  its  parent  with- 
out variation  from  its  hereditary  pattern, 
but  should  also  have  the  power  to  deter- 
mine where  the  untold  millions  of  cells  to 
grow  from  it  are  to  find  their  proper  places 
in  the  future  adult  body.  What  combina- 
tion of  physics  and  chemistry  could  pro- 
duce this  thing,  when  the  inconceivably 
complex  internal  make-up  of  such  a  micro- 
cosm as  that  single  primordial  cell  can- 
not be  conceived  of  even  by  metaphysi- 
cians? 

But  something  by  way  of  explanation 
had  to  be  attempted,  and  therefore  vari- 
ous theories  have  been  propounded.  Now 
theories  are  as  indispensable  in  scientific 
construction  as  scaffolding  is  in  the  erec- 
tion of  a  great  building.  The  mistake, 
then,  would  be  to  lay  the  solid  facts  we  get 
on  the  scaffolding  instead  of  on  the  pre- 
100 


THE   METAZOA 

vious  settled  layer  of  stones,  a  mistake 
which  is  not  uncommon.  Hence  Darwin, 
when  he  found  himself  confronted  by  this 
special  problem,  ten  years  after  he  pub- 
lished his  book  on  the  'Origin  of  Species, 
propounded  a  theory  to  which  he  gave  the 
name  of  Pangenesis. 

This  pangenesis  postulated  a  well-nigh 
infinite  number  of  small  gemmules, 
which  are  given  off  by  every  cell  in  the 
body  and  which  make  their  way  to  the 
primal  microscopic  dot,  so  that  this  con- 
tains a  representation  of  every  part  of 
the  parent  body.  But  as  a  man  who  had 
lost  his  right  leg  would  have  no  right  leg 
gemmules  to  send  thereafter,  so  a  child 
born  to  him  after  his  accident  would  be 
minus  that  leg.  This  and  similar  con- 
siderations led  Darwin  finally,  with  char- 
acteristic candor,  to  pronounce  this  theory 
"  unfortunate." 

Since  Darwin,  or  at  least  for  thirty  years 
101 


WHAT   IS    PHYSICAL   LIFE 

past,  eminent  biologists  such  as  Roux, 
Weismann,  Hertwig,  De  Vries,  Driesch, 
Boveri,  Wilson,  and  a  host  of  others,  have 
been  observing,  experimenting,  and  theo- 
rizing, without  coming  to  the  least  agree- 
ment on  these  subjects;  many  of  them 
virtually  reverting  to  Darwin's  pangene- 
sis,  with  the  result  as  expressed  by  Prof. 
Wilson*  (p.  433),  "The  truth  is  that  an 
explanation  of  development  is  at  pres- 
ent beyond  our  reach." 

We  would  fain  emerge,  therefore,  from 
the  shapeless  fogs  of  the  realm  of  theory 
into  quite  another  territory  whose  chief 
outlines  are  plainly  discernible  and  which 
are  these.  That  the  old  unicellular  forms, 
which  still  hold  the  greater  portion  of  the 
field,  seem,  most  ominously  for  us,  to  have 
resented  the  appearance  of  the  multicellu- 
lar  forms  on  this  globe  and  have  been 

*E.  B.  Wilson,  The  Cell  in  Development  and  Inher- 
itance, Macmillan  &  Co. 

102 


THE   METAZOA 

waging  a  ceaseless  deadly  war  against 
them  ever  since.  We  have  already  seen 
that  so  soon  as  a  tree  or  large  animal  dies, 
its  lifeless  body  is  at  once  attacked  by 
unicellular  forms  in  a  most  effective 
fashion,  as  if  they  would  get  rid  of  every 
trace  of  such  multicellular  things.  But 
their  activities  are  not  only  post-mortem. 
Instead  the  unicellular  forms  remain  ever 
on  the  watch  to  break  through  every  bar- 
rier raised  by  the  metazoa  for  self-defence. 
The  chief  barrier  is  the  thin  basement 
membrane,  as  it  is  called,  on  which  grow 
the  cells  of  the  external  skin  and  of  the 
internal  skin  or  mucous  membrane.  So 
long  as  these  covering  layers  of  cells  are 
healthy,  billions  of  the  enemy  may  accu- 
mulate there  without  effecting  anything. 
The  instructed  surgeon,  however,  well 
knows  that  he  cannot  make  the  smallest 
incision  or  sometimes  even  puncture  of 
this  protective  envelope  without  peril  to 
103 


WHAT   IS   PHYSICAL   LIFE 

his  patient  from  the  inrush  of  unicellular 
invaders,  and  the  great  triumphs  of  mod- 
ern antiseptic  surgery  are  due  to  the  prac- 
tical application  of  the  great  principle 
that  multicellular  must  be  guarded  at 
every  point  from  unicellular  life.  In 
medicine  the  same  principles  are  equally 
important,  because  if  any  part  of  the  pro- 
tecting envelope  is  damaged  by  inflamma- 
tion or  injury,  straightway  an  entrance  for 
the  deadly  old  enemies  is  established. 

But  a  second  and  important  line  of  de- 
fence is  found  in  the  inherent  power  of 
the  healthy  bodily  cells  to  resist  the  in- 
vaders. This  is  well  illustrated  by  an 
experiment  in  which  after  minute  injuries 
have  been  inflicted  by  long,  fine,  but  steril- 
ized needles  in  the  liver,  spleen,  kidneys, 
and  limbs  of  rabbits,  and  then  a  virulent 
culture  of  pus-forming  bacteria  is  injected 
into  a  vein  of  the  rabbit's  ear;  these  bac- 
teria then  circulate  with  the  blood  over  the 
104 


THE  METAZOA 

whole  body  without  affecting  any  of  its 
cells  except  just  where  the  cells  have  been 
injured  by  the  needles;  there  they  at  once 
begin  to  form  abscesses.  The  uninjured 
cells  are  then  said  to  be  endowed  with  a 
vital  resistance  to  the  invaders,  which  is 
wanting  in  those  cells  which  have  been 
devitalized  by  injury.  A  third  line  of  de- 
fence is  found  in  the  healthy  blood  itself, 
which  contains  well-identified  ingredients 
called  opsonins,  which  enable  the  white 
corpuscles  of  the  blood  to  attack  the  in- 
vading bacteria  and  eat  them  up. 

But  what  is  this  all-important  vital 
resistance?  We  need  not  say  how  im- 
portant this  is  when,  if  a  colony  of  tubercle 
bacilli  finds  a  lodgment  in  a  man's  lung, 
his  prospects  will  then  depend  on  his  local 
or  general  stock  of  vitality.  The  lower 
this  is  the  sooner  his  funeral. 

Meantime  we  have  been  reading  the 
assertions  of  a  school  of  biologists,  that 
105 


WHAT   IS   PHYSICAL   LIFE 

there  is  no  such  thing  as  vitality  or  vital 
force.  The  trained  physician  feels  then 
like  bidding  these  mere  theorists  to  hold 
their  peace,  for  the  principles  of  his  great 
science  of  Hygiene  are  as  well  settled  as 
those  of  any  science  whatever.  Those 
principles,  in  short,  are  to  help  life  fight 
life,  that  is,  so  to  promote,  on  the  one 
hand,  the  vitality  of  the  individual  by 
every  means  possible,  that  he  can  success- 
fully resist  invading  micro-organisms,  and, 
on  the  other  hand,  to  make  his  victory 
easier  by  weakening  the  vitality  of  the 
unicellular  enemies.  Vitality,  therefore, 
is  doubly  enlisted.  The  physician  strives 
to  increase  the  general  health  of  the  in- 
dividual by  good  food,  fresh  air,  sunlight, 
cleanliness  or  washing,  and  exercise. 
Meantime  if  he  enters  the  dark,  close 
rooms  of  a  crowded  tenement,  he  knows 
that  pernicious  micro-organisms  are  there 
in  countless  millions.  But  fresh  air  makes 
106 


THE   METAZOA 

most  of  them  sick,  light  also  enfeebles 
them  or  kills  many  of  them  outright,  clean- 
liness, for  the  same  reason,  he  elevates 
into  a  religious  duty,  and  he  is  very  par- 
ticular in  his  inquiries  about  foods,  espe- 
cially milk,  which  he  insists  must  be  steril- 
ized, or  in  other  words  have  the  bacteria 
in  it  destroyed.  Chemistry  and  physics  he 
never  thinks  of  except  as  adjuncts  in  a 
purely  vital  war. 

In  practical  medicine  this  subject  of 
vitality  never  leaves  us.  Serious  diseases 
are  not  always  due  to  micro-organisms. 
Different  physical  causes  may  lead,  for 
example,  to  progressive  heart  and  kidney 
disease,  in  which  the  physician  vainly  tries 
to  arrest  the  downward  course.  Finally 
things  take  a  turn  which  has  led  medical 
authorities  to  make  the  seemingly  para- 
doxical statement  that  but  few  people  die 
of  their  diseases.  It  is  because  the  slow, 
devitalizing  effects  of  previous  disease  on 
107 


WHAT   IS   PHYSICAL   LIFE 

the  body  cells,  especially  in  chronic  heart 
and  kidney  affections,  at  last  open  the  way 
for  a  host  of  micro-organisms  to  enter  un- 
opposed, and  the  post-mortem  table  then 
reveals  how  the  actual  cause  of  death  came 
from  a  vast  invasion  of  what  are  called  the 
terminal  infections.  The  survival  of  the 
fittest  among  metazoa  therefore  belongs 
to  those  who  have  the  most  vitality. 

Solely  to  illustrate  how  the  importance 
of  these  principles  cannot  be  over-esti- 
mated in  their  practical  applications,  I  will 
relate  a  recent  personal  experience.  On 
January  26,  1909,  I  was  called  in  con- 
sultation to  see  a  little  girl  five  years  of 
age,  who  six  days  before  began  with  a 
severe  attack  of  scarlet  fever.  On  the 
third  day  of  this  disease  malignant  diph- 
theria also  supervened,  and  a  thick  mem- 
brane with  a  gangrenous  odor  covered 
all  the  visible  surfaces  of  the  throat,  while 
the  glands  of  the  neck  were  greatly 
108 


THE  METAZOA 

swollen.  I  told  the  attending  physician 
that  the  child  would  not  probably  die 
from  her  two  infections,  but  from  the  gen- 
eral invasion  through  her  ulcerated  throat 
of  numberless  streptococci.  As  the  child 
could  not  swallow,  she  was  to  be  treated 
without  any  medicine,  for  the  hypodermic 
injections  of  strychnine  for  stimulating 
the  failing  heart  which  the  physician  had 
been  giving  would  be  no  more  efficacious 
against  the  condition  than  if  the  little 
syringe  was  emptied  into  a  fire.  The  only 
recourse  left  was  to  freely  douche  the 
throat  as  one  would  wash  a  dirty  sidewalk 
with  a  hose.  We  might  thus  wash  away 
the  armies  of  micro-organisms  and  stop  the 
further  absorption  of  the  diphtheria  toxin 
from  the  decomposing  membrane,  while 
the  patient's  vital  powers  might  be  able 
to  overcome  the  organisms  which  had 
already  gained  entrance,  provided  that 
no  further  additions  were  allowed.  With 
109 


WHAT   IS    PHYSICAL   LIFE 

a  rubber  ball  between  her  teeth  to  keep 
her  mouth  wide  open,  a  couple  of  gal- 
lons of  hot  water  with  chlorate  of  potash 
and  peppermint  were  poured  into  the 
mouth  every  two  hours  night  and  day, 
from  an  elevated  fountain  syringe:  for  if 
the  mouth  be  kept  open  nothing  is  swal- 
lowed, but  the  current  strikes  against  the 
back  of  the  throat  and  returns  by  the 
tonsils,  washing  everything  before  it  as 
it  pours  out  of  the  mouth.  I  saw  her 
again  on  the  28th,  and  was  gratified  to 
note  a  favorable  change  from  the  deathly 
expression  of  her  face  at  the  first  visit. 
She  still  could  not  swallow,  but  the  glands 
in  the  neck  had  begun  to  diminish  in  size, 
though  much  membrane  remained  in  the 
throat.  On  the  30th  I  found  that  she  could 
swallow,  but  that  there  remained  the  fol- 
lowing complications  to  expect,  like  so 
many  rocks  in  shooting  rapids  with  a  canoe. 
First  the  scarlatinal  agent  would  invade 
110 


THE   METAZOA 

the  ears;  then  twenty-five  per  cent,  of 
deaths  from  scarlet  fever  are  due  to  pneu- 
monia; then  pleurisy  is  especially  to  be 
dreaded  in  these  cases,  as  it  so  often  ends 
in  the  abscess  of  the  pleura  called  empy- 
ema:  then  death  might  be  caused  by  the 
diphtheria  toxin  dissolving,  as  it  were, 
strands  of  the  heart  muscle,  and  lastly 
streptococcic  invasion  of  the  kidneys 
might  end  the  scene.  All  of  these  dan- 
gers occurred  to  the  child  in  their  order 
except  the  last.  Abscesses  in  both  ears 
developed  the  next  day,  but  a  skilful 
aurist  was  at  hand  and  freed  the  ears 
completely.  This,  of  itself,  was  no  small 
gain,  for  many  cases  of  hard  hearing 
throughout  life  date  from  the  ear  inflam- 
mations by  scarlet  fever  in  childhood,  and 
I  have  been  told  that  the  same  cause  ac- 
counts for  twenty  per  cent,  of  the  deaf 
mutes  in  our  asylums.  On  February  2, 1 
found  a  patch  of  pneumonia  with  pleurisy 

an 


WHAT   IS   PHYSICAL   LIFE 

in  the  left  lung  between  the  shoulder- 
blades,  but  in  five  days  the  child's  vital 
powers  dealt  successfully  with  them  both. 
She  was  now  quite  hungry  and  always  had 
her  doll  with  her.  Lastly,  the  weak  in- 
termittent pulse  showed  that  the  diph- 
theria poison  was  doing  its  work.  Now 
on  the  twenty-fifth  day  of  her  illness  for 
the  first  time  she  took  medicine,  but  it 
took  longer  to  relieve  this  complication 
than  in  the  case  of  any  of  the  others, 
before  she  finally  recovered  completely. 

I  have  told  this  long  story  simply  to 
show  what  a  great  and  real  thing  vitality 
is.  The  physician's  duty  is  to  see  to  it  that 
vitality  has  fair  play  in  such  a  battle  for 
life. 

Therefore,  instead  of  regarding  the 
principles  of  Hygiene  as  one  would  gen- 
eral dictates  to  be  good  and  virtuous,  these 
truths  furnish  quite  specific  reasons  for 
attending  to  health,  for  only  thus  can  we 


THE   METAZOA 

postpone  the  inevitable  end.  Because  the 
supreme  fact  is  that  not  by  physical  causes 
is  our  stay  on  earth  usually  ended.  Phys- 
ical causes  may  occasionally  terminate  life 
by  storm,  earthquakes  or  flood,  or  through 
human  perversity  by  wars,  but  aside  from 
such  happenings  it  is  by  the  agency  of  a 
great  living  kingdom  that  our  mortal 
bodies  return  dust  to  dust. 

It  is  also  life  which  destroys  life  when 
death  is  caused  by  those  dread  and  well- 
named  malignant  diseases,  cancer  and  sar- 
coma. Never  before  in  medical  history 
has  there  been  such  diligent  and  intelligent 
search  for  the  origin  of  these  terrible  affec- 
tions as  now,  until  it  begins  to  look  as  if 
instead  of  coming  from  the  old  class  of 
unicellular  micro-organisms  they  come 
from  a  native  metazoan  cell  which  has 
deserted  to  the  enemy.  As  with  other 
renegades  its  greatest  hostility  is  to  its  old 
associates,  and  it  is  all  the  more  dangerous 
113 


WHAT   IS   PHYSICAL   LIFE 

because  it  retains  some  of  the  metazoan 
powers. 

We  can  explain  this  in  a  few  words. 
We  have  said  that  the  great  wonder  of 
a  metazoan  body  is  the  interdependence 
of  its  cells,  each  having  and  each  keeping 
its  own  place.  Moreover,  though  each 
metazoan  cell  retains  its  original  endow- 
ment of  indefinite  multiplication,  yet  it 
always  holds  this  in  check  in  deference  to 
the  rights  of  its  neighbors.  If  by  any 
chance  a  normal  metazoan  cell  be  freed 
from  neighbors,  then  it  grows  by  the  mil- 
lion till  it  comes  to  neighbors  again,  where- 
upon it  resumes  its  proper  consideration 
for  their  territorial  rights.  This  is  well 
illustrated  when  the  surgeon  implants  on 
a  large  ulcerated  surface  on  the  skin  which 
will  not  heal,  minute  pieces  of  normal  skin 
grafts  whose  cells  then  multiply  actively, 
far  more  than  in  their  original  place,  with 
the  significant  addition  that  they  now 


THE  METAZOA 

throw  out  invisible  germinal  particles  to- 
wards the  nearest  healthy  cells  at  the  edge 
of  the  sore,  stimulating  them  to  aid  in 
forming  a  bridge  across  to  the  grafts.  In 
time  the  open  sore  is  thus  covered  with 
good  skin,  whose  cells  at  once  quit 
multiplying  so  soon  as  they  join  healthy 
skin  cells. 

But  now  among  apparently  the  most 
well  behaved  metazoic  cells  there  appears, 
no  one  yet  knows  why  or  how,  a  pure 
rebel  against  life's  beneficent  law  of  mu- 
tual dependence  and  co-operation.  This 
rebel  will  grow  and  multiply  just  where  it 
pleases  without  the  least  consideration  for 
the  traditional  claims  of  others.  Thus  a 
cell  from  the  mucous  membrane  of  the 
lower  intestine  leaves  that  place  and  finds 
its  way  by  the  blood  stream  till  it  lodges  in 
the  brain,  and  then  grows  where  it  has  no 
more  business  to  be  than  a  chimney  sweep 
has  to  be  ensconced  in  a  lady's  boudoir. 
115 


WHAT   IS   PHYSICAL   LIFE 

It  not  only  pushes  aside  its  neighbors, 
but  invades  their  tissues  and  by  intruding 
between  nerves  causes  agonizing  pains. 
Meantime  it  retains  enough  of  its  meta- 
zoan  powers  to  give  rise  to  organized 
growths  or  tumors  with  blood-vessels  and 
other  tissues,  but  with  such  poor  vitality 
that  these  growths  ultimately  break  down 
into  repulsive  and  highly  poisonous  ulcers. 
Unlike  the  old  unicellular  enemies,  it  cares 
little  for  hygiene,  for  it  counts  emperors 
and  queens  among  its  victims  as  well  as 
laborers  and  washerwomen,  destroying 
those  also  who  live  moral  lives  just  the 
same  as  those  who  do  not.  That  its  origin 
lies  in  the  deepest  processes  of  cell  nutri- 
tion is  shown,  as  we  have  already  stated, 
by  its  occurrence  in  all  vertebrates,  not 
excepting  fishes,  for  trout  die  of  cancer 
as  well  as  we  ourselves. 

These  being  the  melancholy  facts,  about 
our  only  recourse  is  to  detect  the  presence 
116 


THE   METAZOA 

of  this  enemy  in  the  body  as  early  as 
possible  in  his  separate  existence  and  then 
cut  him  out  with  the  surgeon's  knife  before 
he  can  shed  off  any  of  his  living  germs. 
There  is  a  faint  hope  that  a  sarcoma  may 
find  its  match  in  a  foe  belonging  to  the 
unicellular  camp,  for  in  some  cases  an 
artificial  erysipelas  caused  by  inoculation 
with  its  bacteria  has  put  an  end  to  these 
growing  tumors,  and  the  mysterious  rays 
given  off  by  the  element  radium  while  un- 
dergoing atemic  disintegration  have,  tem- 
porarily at  least,  put  a  stop  to  spreading 
superficial  cancers.  But  when  we  con- 
sider how  living  these  malignant  things 
are,  the  prospect  of  successfully  dealing 
with  them  is  much  less  than  with  the  old 
unicellular  enemies. 


CHAPTER   V 

THE   GREAT    FOOD    QUESTION 

FOR  us  to  show  how  important  the  food 
question  is  to  life  may  remind  some  of 
Artemus  Ward,  who,  in  an  illustrated  lec- 
ture on  his  travels,  drew  the  particular 
attention  of  his  audience  to  the  fact,  shown 
by  his  picture,  that  the  highest  part  of  a 
mountain  is  its  top!  That  earthly  life 
depends  on  food  is  equally  clear  and  in- 
disputable. But  after  all,  things  most 
commonplace  may  hide  behind  them  some 
of  the  greatest  and  deepest  mysteries  of 
the  world.  Thus  the  ancient  Greeks,  after 
carving  an  Apollo  Belvedere  out  of  stone, 
placed  the  choicest  viands  and  the  finest 
wines  before  this  statue  of  the  god  on  his 
feast  days.  They  well  knew  that  this 
procedure  was  altogether  a  pious  make- 
118 


THE   FOOD   QUESTION 

believe.  However  life-like  it  may  be, 
nothing  but  what  is  really  living  can  be 
fed.  Nor  were  the  old  Egyptians  differ- 
ent when  they  surrounded  their  dead 
mummies  with  articles  of  food  and  drink 
for  the  spirits  which  hovered  about  them. 
Their  mummies  did  live  once,  and  why  not 
let  them  eat  and  drink  as  they  did  before? 
The  answer  is  the  same:  nothing  without 
life  can  be  fed. 

Darwin  indeed  made  the  strife  over  the 
great  Food  Question  about  the  only  cre- 
ator needed  for  calling  living  forms  into 
existence,  as  Nature,  he  said,  practically 
put  the  same  question  to  all,  namely,  how 
to  eat  or  keep  from  being  eaten.  It  was 
the  food  question  which  set  Natural  Selec- 
tion to  shape  the  lion  so  that  he  would  be 
well  hid  while  waiting  for  his  living  meal 
on  a  gazelle,  and  in  turn  made  the  legs  of 
the  gazelle  good  for  running  away  from 
him. 

119 


WHAT   IS   PHYSICAL   LIFE 

But  Darwin  builded  better  than  he 
knew  by  making  the  food  question  such 
a  great  one  in  the  process  of  life,  for 
modern  physiology  has  extended  its  scope 
from  the  bodies  of  animals  to  each  cell  in 
their  bodies.  In  this  undreamed  of  ex- 
tension, Natural  Selection  is  simply 
swamped,  or  rather  it  is  like  emptying  a 
little  brook  into  a  sea.  For  now  we  find 
that  the  different  cells  of  the  metazoic 
body  which  had  first  given  up  their  in- 
dependence for  interdependence,  as  we 
have  described,  on  the  food  question  re- 
assert their  original  autonomy.  Every 
cell  of  the  body  insists  on  having  its  own 
diet.  They  all  must  have  food  or  they 
would  die  of  starvation.  They  can  grow 
and  be  themselves  in  shape  and  in  function 
only  according  to  what  they  feed  upon. 
But  a  muscle  cell  cannot  live  on  what  a 
bone  cell  lives  on,  nor  will  the  simple  fare 
which  suffices  for  a  cartilage  cell  be  ac- 
120 


THE   FOOD   QUESTION 

cepted  by  a  nerve  cell  which  demands  the 
most  elaborate  and  varied  menu  of  any- 
thing living.  They  all  get  what  they  want 
from  that  wonderfully  composite,  all- 
nourishing  blood,  but  they  carefully  select 
just  what  they  want  and  reject  what  they 
do  not  want.  The  cells  which  make  hairs 
never  allow  any  ingredients  of  the  bile, 
which  liver  cells  make,  to  enter  them. 
And  so  on  to  the  end.  No  such  multi- 
form discrimination  meets  us  anywhere  as 
in  this  realm  of  life. 

This  very  particular  selection  by  body 
cells  of  their  food  stuffs,  is  one  of  the  great 
puzzles  of  biologists.  Many  of  them  have 
come  to  the  conclusion  that  the  cells  know 
so  well  what  they  ought  to  have  that  they 
must  be  actually  endowed  with  conscious- 
ness and  choose  accordingly.  Professor  G. 
Bunge  *  of  the  University  of  Basle  quotes 

*  Textbook  of  Physiological  and  Pathological  Chem- 
istry, P.  Blakiston  &  Son,  Philadelphia,  1902. 

121 


WHAT   IS   PHYSICAL   LIFE 

in  illustration  the  observations  of  Cien- 
kowski  on  a  minute  ameba  called  Vampy- 
rella,  that  will  take  but  one  form  of  food, 
which  is  a  particular  variety  of  algge,  the 
Spirogyra.  The  Vampyrella  creeps  along 
among  numbers  of  other  algae  until  it 
meets  with  a  Spirogyra,  to  which  it  then 
affixes  itself  and  perforating  its  cellulose 
coat  it  sucks  in  the  contents  of  its  cell, 
and  then  travels  in  quest  of  the  next 
Spirogyra,  to  repeat  the  process.  Cien- 
kowski  never  saw  the  Vampyrella  attack 
any  other  class  of  alga3,  or  take  up  any 
other  substance.  Vaucherae,  Edogoniae, 
etc.,  purposely  placed  before  it,  were  al- 
ways rejected.  "  The  behavior  of  these 
single-celled  creatures  in  their  search  after 
food,  and  in  their  method  of  absorbing 
it,  is  so  remarkable,"  says  Cienkowski, 
"  that  one  can  hardly  avoid  the  conclu- 
sion that  the  acts  are  those  of  conscious 
beings." 


THE   FOOD   QUESTION 

We  may  say  that  similar  discriminating 
performances  are  shown  by  certain  vam- 
pires in  our  money  markets,  who  show 
no  interest  in  anybody  except  in  those  who 
own  stocks  and  bonds.  To  these  they  at- 
tach themselves  and  soon  transfer  all  their 
stocks  to  their  own  pockets  ere  they  pass  to 
the  next  victim.  "  But,"  Professor  Bunge 
continues,  "  just  as  the  Vampyrella  picks 
out  the  Spirogyra  from  amongst  all  other 
alga?,  so  do  the  epithelial  cells  of  our  in- 
testines select  the  fat  drops  and  reject  the 
pigment  granules.  We  know  that  these 
intestinal  epithelial  cells  prevent  the  ab- 
sorption of  a  whole  series  of  poisons,  in 
spite  of  the  fact  that  the  latter  are  easily 
soluble  in  the  gastric  and  intestinal  juices. 
.  .  .  Also  in  all  secreting  cells  we  find 
the  same  mysterious  power  of  selec- 
tion." 

Similar  doctrines  attributing  reasoning 
power  to  the  cells,  and  thereby  to  the  lower 
123 


WHAT   IS   PHYSICAL   LIFE 

animals  and  plants,  all  based  on  the  food 
question,  are  advanced  by  such  biologists 
as  Delfino,  Cope,  Pauly,  and  Firanci, 
while  Sir  Francis  Darwin,  son  of  Charles 
Darwin,  in  his  inaugural  address  as  Pres- 
ident of  the  British  Association  of  Science, 
at  Dublin,  1908,  says:  "It  is  impossible 
to  know  whether  or  not  plants  are  con- 
scious; but  it  is  consistent  with  the  doc- 
trine of  continuity  that  in  all  living  things 
there  is  something  psychic,  and  if  we  ac- 
cept this  point  of  view,  we  must  believe 
that  in  plants  there  exists  a  faint  copy  of 
what  we  know  as  consciousness  in  our- 
selves." 

But  at  this  point  we  must  part  company 
with  these  learned  observers.  Though  ad- 
mitting that  life  is  fundamentally  one  in 
both  plant  and  animal,  yet  in  common 
with  most  of  our  fellows  we  regard  con- 
sciousness as  the  sole  attribute  of  certain 
sentient  nervous  centres,  and  hence  cannot 


THE   FOOD   QUESTION 

but  regard  those  whose  steps  logically 
lead  them  to  conscious  potatoes  and 
cabbage  heads  as  well  on  the  way  to 
absurdity. 

Quite  another  aspect  of  this  problem  in 
cell  life,  and  one  which  apparently  affords 
considerable  support  to  the  anti-vitalists, 
is  presented  by  some  researches  in  medical 
science,  on  the  subject  of  Immunity.  To 
determine  why  a  single  attack  of  some 
infectious  diseases  renders  that  person  im- 
mune against  a  second  attack  of  the  same, 
or  why  some  persons  seem  to  have  a  nat- 
ural immunity  against  infections  in  gen- 
eral, while  others  are  very  susceptible  to 
them,  or  why  some  infections  confer  only 
temporary  immunity  or  none  at  all  against 
their  recurrence,  are  certainly  questions 
of  much  practical  importance.  Their  in- 
vestigation has  led  recently  to  some  of  the 
most  abstruse  speculations  in  the  history 
of  medicine.  Now  theories  are  valuable 
125 


WHAT   IS   PHYSICAL   LIFE 

in  proportion  to  their  number  of  explana- 
tions, and  as  no  demonstrated  facts  long 
remain  isolated  in  science,  so  one  largely 
accepted  theory  of  the  mechanism  of 
immunity,  called  Professor  Ehrlich's  side 
chain  theory,  is  found  ultimately  to  have 
important  relations  to  our  subject  of  cell 
assimilation  of  food,  or  in  other  words, 
how  it  is  that  food  feeds  us.  It  is  difficult, 
however,  to  lead  the  general  reader  along 
the  intricate  lines  of  this  hypothesis  with- 
out giving  him  a  headache,  and  so  we  will 
only  attempt  a  necessarily  imperfect  out- 
line of  it,  by  beginning  with  a  rough  illus- 
tration. If  the  reader  has  ever  had  the 
pleasure,  or  to  some  the  horror,  of  seeing 
that  fresh-water  polyp  called  a  hydra 
f usca  in  a  water  receptacle  which  allows 
him  to  be  seen  with  a  low  magnifying 
power,  he  then  looks  like  a  great  octopus 
swinging  his  ugly  arms,  all  covered  with 
contractile  nodules,  about  in  the  water.  A 
126 


THE   FOOD   QUESTION 

careful  inspection  shows  that  he  holds  sev- 
eral long,  fine  fish-lines  at  the  end  of  each 
of  his  arms,  these  lines  terminating  in  a 
little  round  poison  sack  surmounted  by  a 
perfect  barb,  thus,  j  Swimming  actively 
about  are  many  little  white  crustaceans 
called  daphnes,  wholly  unmindful  of  the 
hydra,  when  suddenly  one  of  them  is  seen 
to  swim  no  longer.  Watching  this  now 
motionless  daphne,  it  is  found  that  one 
of  the  fatal  barbs  has  struck  him  and  that 
he  is  motionless  because  paralyzed  by  the 
poison  from  that  little  sack.  Then  the 
hydra  pulls  the  crustacean  in  as  a  fisher- 
man would  a  trout  he  had  hooked,  and 
soon  the  hydra  eats  him  up.  Now  those 
living  cells  in  our  blood  called  the  white 
corpuscles  are  capable  of  throwing  out 
what  are  termed  their  pseudopodia:  these 
have  been  seen  to  seize  invading  bacteria 
and  to  draw  them  in  to  be  devoured  and 
digested  by  the  white  cell.  This  phenom- 
127, 


WHAT   IS    PHYSICAL   LIFE 

enon  forms  the  basis  of  MetchnikofF s 
phagocytic  or  cell-eating  theory  of  im- 
munity. But  some  bacteria  kill,  not  by 
themselves  entering  the  blood  but  by  their 
first  securing  a  lodgment  in  some  part 
where  they  stay,  generating  a  virulent 
soluble  poison  which  poison,  and  not  the 
bacilli,  is  then  absorbed  into  the  blood. 
This  is  the  case  with  the  tetanus  or  lock- 
jaw bacillus,  and  hence  a  tetanus  anti- 
toxin must  save  a  patient  with  lockjaw 
in  a  different  way  than  by  Metchnikoff's 
phagocytes.  With  Ehrlich's  side  chain 
theory,  therefore,  our  hydra  illustration 
would  have  to  be  modified  into  imagining 
the  chains  of  nodules  on  the  hydra's  arms 
as  themselves  shooting  out  lines  of  attrac- 
tion which  arrest  the  poisons  as  they  pass 
in  the  blood  and  draw  them  in  to  be  in- 
corporated into  the  nodule. 

But  these  lines  of  attraction  must  be 
purely  chemical  in  their  nature,  or  in  other 
128 


THE   FOOD   QUESTION 

words  lines  of  chemical  affinity  for  ingre- 
dients in  the  poisons,  and  the  phenomenon 
itself,  therefore,  has  received  the  name  of 
chemio-taxis,  or  chemical  drawing.  There- 
fore on  this  principle  every  cell  of  the  body 
when  it  draws  its  food  from  the  lymph 
which  comes  to  it  from  the  blood,  selects 
what  it  wants  by  chemio-taxis,  that  is,  by 
a  power  or  property  which  is  not  essen- 
tially different  in  nature  from  other  chem- 
ical affinities.  Therefore,  our  supposedly 
living  attribute  of  nutrition  by  feeding 
turns  out  after  all  to  be  a  thing  of  chem- 
istry. 

Admitting  all  this  to  be  true,  yet 
chemio-taxis  no  more  explains  life  itself 
than  anything  else  does.  It  is  life  which 
produces  chemio-taxis,  and  not  chemio- 
taxis  which  produces  life.  Our  former 
comparison  still  holds  that  it  is  not  smoke 
which  causes  fire,  but  it  is  fire  which  causes 
smoke.  Life  produces  all  kinds  of  chem- 
129 


WHAT   IS   PHYSICAL   LIFE 

ical  things,  with  this  important  difference, 
that  organic  chemistry,  i.e.,  that  which  is 
produced  by  living  agencies,  is  vastly  more 
complex  in  its  processes  than  inorganic 
chemistry.  A  molecule  of  water,  for  ex- 
ample, has  only  three  atoms  in  its  com- 
position, two  of  hydrogen,  and  one  of 
oxygen,  but  a  molecule  of  cane-sugar  has 
forty-five  atoms,  and,  moreover,  these 
atoms  are  so  differently  arranged  in  differ- 
ent sugars  that  a  painstaking  authority 
has  written  five  volumes  on  the  sugars 
alone,  and  is  not  through  with  them 
yet. 

Whatever  else,  therefore,  may  be  said 
of  organic  chemistry,  this  is  certain,  that 
something  enters  into  its  processes  which 
is  not  found  in  any  other  chemistry,  that 
something  making  its  products  far  re- 
moved from  all  other  chemical  compo- 
nents in  the  make-up  of  their  mole- 
cules. 

130 


THE   FOOD   QUESTION 

But  if  each  kind  of  cell  in  the  body  has 
its  own  chemistry,  we  may  well  be  stag- 
gered at  the  infinite  number  of  shapes  and 
forms  which  vital  chemistry  assumes. 
Thus  we  must  have  a  different  and  special 
chemio-taxis  for  the  cell  which  is  helping 
to  make  a  toe  nail  from  one  which  is 
building  up  a  centre  for  sight  in  the  brain 
cortex,  and  then  untold  thousands  more 
of  varying  kinds  of  chemio-taxis  the  body 
over. 

It  is  the  frequent  recurrence  of  such 
embarrassing  conclusions  which  is  making 
many  of  the  younger  biologists  weary  with 
all  physico-chemical  explanations  of  life. 
As  J.  E.  Haldane,  M.D.,  F.R.S.,  Profes- 
sor of  Physiology  in  the  University  of 
Oxford,  remarks :  "  As  a  matter  of  fact, 
the  physico-chemical  theory  of  life  has  not 
worked  in  the  past  and  can  never  work. 
Those  who  aim  at  physico-chemical  ex- 
planations of  life  are  simply  running  their 
131 


WHAT   IS   PHYSICAL   LIFE 

heads  at  a  stone  wall,  and  can  only  expect 
sore  heads  as  a  consequence."  * 

*  Address  as  President  of  the  Section  of  Physiology, 
Brit.  Assoc.  Science,  1908. 


132 


CHAPTER   VI 

ADAPTATIONS 

PROFESSOR  E.  B.  WILSON  *  says,  "  What- 
ever position  we  take,  the  same  difficulty  is 
encountered,  namely,  the  origin  of  that  co- 
ordinated fitness,  that  power  of  active  ad- 
justment between  internal  and  external 
relations,  which,  as  so  many  eminent  bio- 
logical thinkers  have  insisted,  overshadows 
every  manifestation  of  life." 

They  might  well  say  so. 

The  word  fitness  at  once  suggests 
mechanism.  The  different  parts  of  a 
watch  would  not  make  a  watch  unless  they 
were  made  to  fit  into  each  other.  The 
same  holds  true  if  it  be  a  living  mechanism. 
Moreover,  it  is  not  the  materials  out  of 
which  this  mechanism  is  composed  which 

*  The  Cell  in  Development  and  Inheritance,  p.  329. 
133 


WHAT   IS    PHYSICAL   LIFE 

make  it  a  mechanism.  Very  far  from  it. 
We  might  reduce  a  watch  to  powder  with- 
out the  least  loss  of  its  materials,  but  then 
we  would  not  have  the  watch  any  more. 
So  a  living  mechanism  is  not  the  same 
with  its  component  materials,  but  justifies 
our  speaking  of  it  as  a  living  mechanism 
only  when  its  parts  are  adjusted  to  each 
other  with  a  fitness  which  is  beyond  that 
of  any  non-living  mechanism  in  the  world. 
We  shall  see  that  there  is  no  fitness  like 
a  living  fitness. 

A  great  steam  engine,  for  example,  is 
not  near  as  complex,  nor  does  it  require 
a  tithe  of  the  adjustments  of  its  parts 
with  one  another,  which  are  necessary  in 
a  human  eyelid.  Not  counting  the  lach- 
rymal gland  and  its  appendages,  an  eyelid 
of  ours  is  anatomically  made  up  of  at 
least  forty-eight  different  structures  and 
special  arrangements  of  tissues,  any  one 
of  which,  if  it  did  not  fit  in  with  the  rest, 
134 


ADAPTATIONS 

would  give  trouble.  Thus  the  two  eyelids 
are  kept  in  shape  in  a  totally  different  way 
from  the  two  lips  of  the  mouth,  by  a 
peculiar  ring  which  for  long  was  mis- 
takenly supposed  to  be  cartilaginous, 
whereas  it  does  not  have  a  cartilage  cell 
in  it,  but  instead  is  made  of  two  plates  of 
denser  fibrous  tissue  than  is  found  any- 
where else  in  the  body.  Then  it  would 
be  unfortunate  if  the  plate  in  the  lower 
eyelid  were  of  the  same  size  and  shape  as 
that  of  the  upper  eyelid.  For  one  thing 
it  would  disfigure  a  lady  more  than  the 
worst  squint.  Nor  would  it  do  if  there 
were  as  many  eyelashes  near  the  inner 
angle  of  the  eye  as  at  the  other  end;  nor 
if  the  eyelashes  of  the  upper  lid  were  not 
more  numerous  and  longer  than  those  of 
the  lower  lid,  and  more  than  all,  if  those 
of  the  upper  lid  did  not  curve  up  and  those 
of  the  lower  lid  curve  down.  To  make 
these  hairs  grow  that  way  and  not  like 
135 


WHAT  IS  PHYSICAL  LIFE 
the  hairs  of  the  eyebrows  or  those  of  any 
other  part,  a  special  arrangement  of  the 
cells  at  their  roots  had  to  be  provided. 
Then  to  keep  the  eyelids  from  sticking 
together  in  sleep,  appear  rows  of  twenty 
to  thirty  very  peculiar  glands  composed 
of  straight  tubes  with  buds,  on  their  sides, 
and  secreting  in  their  special  cells  an 
oily  substance  different  in  chemical  com- 
position from  any  other  secretion,  etc., 
etc. 

Such  are  the  visible  structures  of  an 
eyelid,  but,  as  every  medical  student 
knows  to  his  sorrow,  the  microscope  has 
more  than  quadrupled  the  number  of  facts 
which  he  must  learn  about  the  structures 
of  organs,  all  of  which  have  to  do  with 
fitness.  In  the  case  of  the  eyelid  he  may 
well  add  facts  about  the  beginning  of  eye- 
lids in  both  human  and  in  comparative 
embryology. 

But  to  stop  in  the  consideration  of  adap- 
136 


ADAPTATIONS 

tations  at  an  eyelid,  and  not  pass  on  to  the 
Eye  itself,  would  be  like  a  tourist  failing 
to  go  beyond  the  railroad  station  of  the 
great  city  which  he  had  reached.  There 
is  scarcely  a  tissue  of  the  body  which  is 
not  represented  in  the  eye,  besides  a  num- 
ber of  others  not  found  elsewhere,  and  if 
we  include  the  connections  of  the  eye  with 
the  brain,  the  number  and  variety  of  its 
specific  adaptations  well-nigh  exceed  com- 
putation. Darwin  is  reported  to  have 
said  that  the  eye  made  him  shudder  when 
he  thought  of  accounting  for  it  by  Nat- 
ural Selection.  Now  the  radical  difficulty 
with  natural  selection  is  that  it  cannot 
produce  anything,  nor  originate  anything, 
least  of  all  produce  an  adaptation,  whether 
simple  or  complex.  All  it  can  do  is  to 
select  and  perpetuate  an  adaptation  al- 
ready made.  When  a  housewife  picks  out 
of  a  barrel  the  apples  which  are  beginning 
to  rot,  her  selection  has  not  produced  a 
137 


WHAT   IS   PHYSICAL   LIFE 

single  one  of  the  sound  apples  which  re- 
main. But  this  difficulty  about  the  eye 
is  not  lessened  by  the  fact  that  some  of 
the  earliest  and  generally  simpler  animal 
forms  nevertheless  had  extraordinarily 
complex  eyes.  Some  creatures  living  in 
the  darkness  of  the  ocean  depths  provide 
themselves  with  what  are  virtually  lan- 
terns to  help  their  eyes  out.  This  means 
that  life  has  no  limits  in  her  ways  for 
helping  functions.  But  where  no  seeing 
is  possible,  life  gives  up  the  useless  at- 
tempt and  bids  the  fishes  in  the  under- 
ground rivers  of  the  Mammoth  Cave  to 
go  without  eyes.  This  may  be  called  a 
negative  adaptation,  the  opposite  of  that 
of  the  eagle's  eyes  as  he  soars  towards 
the  sun. 

However,   we  need  not   dwell  longer 
upon  this  instance  of  a  living  mechanism 
which  in  a  small  space  shows  more  ex- 
amples of  fitness  in  adaptation  than  the 
138 


ADAPTATIONS 

whole  world  of  human  mechanical  devices, 
and  proceed  to  what  seem  to  be  much 
simpler  arrangements  for  doing  special 
work.  Thus  as  to  the  intake  of  oxygen 
and  the  outgo  of  carbonic  acid  in  breath- 
ing. Professor  Haldane,  whose  researches 
on  this  subject  are  highly  rated,  remarks: 
"  Liebig  believed  that  the  rate  of  respira- 
tory change  was  regulated  by  the  supply 
to  the  body  of  oxygen  and  of  food 
material.  If  one  breathed  faster,  the  re- 
spiratory exchange  was  assumed  to  be  also 
increased,  just  as  ordinary  combustion 
outside  the  body  would  be  increased  by 
an  increased  supply  of  oxygen.  If,  again, 
one  took  more  food,  it  was  supposed  that 
the  excess  went  to  increase  the  rate  of 
combustion  in  the  blood,  just  as  a  fire  is 
increased  when  more  fuel  is  supplied.  We 
now  know  that  these  assumptions  were 
wholly  mistaken,  and  that  the  respiratory 
movements,  respiratory  exchange,  and  cor- 
139 


WHAT   IS   PHYSICAL   LIFE 

responding  consumption  of  food  material 
in  the  body  are  regulated  with  astounding 
exactitude  in  accordance  with  bodily  re- 
quirements. If,  for  instance,  the  body 
consumes  more  proteid,  it  economizes  a 
quantity  of  fat  and  of  carbohydrate  equiv- 
alent in  energy  value  to  the  proteid,  so 
that  from  day  to  day  the  amount  of  energy 
liberated  in  the  body  is  very  steady."  In 
other  words,  the  body  adjusts  its  chem- 
istry just  as  it  adjusts  everything 
else. 

The  heat  of  the  body  is  also  kept  up 
by  chemical  processes,  but  for  that  pur- 
pose more  internal  arrangements  and  ad- 
justments to  external  conditions  have  to 
be  in  incessant  operation  than  in  the  case 
of  respiration.  Even  to  enumerate  them 
would  require  many  pages,  and  more 
pages  still  to  explain  them.  Thus  the 
human  body  maintains  just  the  same  tem- 
perature, whether  it  be  on  the  shores  of 
140 


ADAPTATIONS 

the  Arctic  Ocean  or  in  the  hottest  regions 
of  the  world.  The  Esquimaux  live  where, 
during  the  long  winter,  the  air  is  from 
128  to  148  degrees  colder  than  their  blood, 
while  the  people  of  Zanzibar  live  for 
months  where  the  air  they  breathe  is  20 
degrees  warmer  than  their  blood.  More 
than  a  hundred  years  ago  Dr.  Blagden, 
president  of  the  Royal  Society,  and  Dr. 
Fordyce,  F.R.S.,  stayed  for  twenty  min- 
utes in  heated  ovens  which  cooked  a  beef- 
steak in  13  minutes,  without  the  normal 
heat  of  their  blood  meanwhile  varying  in 
the  least.  They  reported  that  their  watch 
chains  were  then  too  hot  to  touch,  while 
the  air  which  they  exhaled  from  their  lungs 
felt  refreshingly  cool. 

Nothing,  indeed,  but  internal  derange- 
ments can  change  the  normal  temperature 
of  the  blood,  and  hence  the  value  of  the 
clinical  thermometer  in  disease.  But  to 
explain  fever  itself  pathologists  have  la- 
141 


WHAT   IS   PHYSICAL   LIFE 

bored  and  experimented  for  years  on 
account  of  the  complexity  of  the  problems 
they  encounter.  One  result  is  curious,  and 
that  is  that  fever  is  a  good  thing  to  have 
under  the  circumstances.  Professor  W. 
G.  MacCallum  *  of  Johns  Hopkins  Uni- 
versity says :  "  It  seems  probable  that 
every  detail  of  this  fever  reaction  is  that 
which  is  best  calculated  to  take  its  own 
special  part  in  the  making  up  of  a  whole 
well-ordered  plan.  The  conclusion  seems 
inevitable  that  this  plan  is  one  devised 
for  the  good  of  the  organism  and  that 
fever  in  its  essentials  is  a  protective 
reaction." 

It  will  be  noted  that  biological  investi- 
gators can  hardly  escape  from  using  lan- 
guage about  living  processes  which  im- 
ply design  and  purpose.  The  celebrated 
physiologist,  Sir  Michael  Foster,  when 

*New  York  Harvey  Society  Lectures,  1908;  MacCal- 
lum on  "  Fever  Processes." 

142 


ADAPTATIONS 

asked  once  why  a  certain  physiological 
fact  was  so,  replied,  "  Because  it  wants 
to  be  so!" 

If  we  did  not  prolong  the  consideration 
of  the  adaptations  of  part  to  part  in  the 
Eye,  because  the  reader's  patience  would 
be  exhausted  long  before  they  were  all 
enumerated,  what  are  we  to  do  with  the 
Nervous  System?  An  old  anatomist  well 
said,  the  nervous  system  is  the  animal.  He 
is  all  there,  to  be  sure,  with  more  special 
adjustments  in  his  nervous  make-up  than 
in  all  the  rest  of  his  body.  In  fact  its 
illustrations  of  marvellous  fitnesses  are 
altogether  too  many  for  us,  and  so  we  will 
leave  the  nervous  system  and  allude,  in 
conclusion,  to  the  place  which  one  of  four 
mysterious  organs  has  in  the  ordering  of 
our  physical  life.  These  four  organs,  the 
Pituitary,  the  Thyroid,  the  Islands  of 
Langerhans,  and  the  Adrenal  Glands, 
pass  directly  into  the  blood  and  not 
143 


WHAT   IS   PHYSICAL   LIFE 

through  ducts,  peculiar  substances  which 
are  very  necessary  to  life.  The  pituitary 
gland  is  a  small  affair  from  five  to  ten 
grains  in  weight,  only  its  anterior  half 
heing  of  much  account,  and  its  resting 
place  is  in  the  sella  turcica  or  Turkish 
saddle-like  depression  in  the  most  solid 
bone  in  the  body,  at  the  base  of  the  skull. 
Disease  of  this  gland  has  been  supposed 
to  be  the  cause  of  those  fearful  deformities 
in  the  growth  of  the  skull  and  of  other 
bony  structures  to  which  the  name  acro- 
megaly  has  been  given.  That  it  has  im- 
portant relations  to  bodily  nutrition  can- 
not be  doubted,  because  its  experimental 
excision  leads  in  time  to  death  with  very 
characteristic  symptoms.  But  as  its  phys- 
iological mysteries  have  not  yet  been  fully 
solved,  we  must  await  their  future  dem- 
onstration. The  thyroid  also  we  omit, 
because  more  than  two  thousand  books 
and  articles  have  been  published  so  far  on 


ADAPTATIONS 

Graves'  Disease,  which  most  writers,  but 
not  myself,*  regard  as  a  disease  of  this 
gland.  For  occasioning  unending  discus- 
sion, the  thyroid  in  medicine  is  like  the 
tariff  in  politics,  and  so  we  pass  on  to  take 
up  the  Islands  of  Langerhans. 

The  Islands  of  Langerhans  are  peculiar 
gland  structures  imbedded  in  the  pancreas 
and  which  add  to  the  blood  an  internal 
secretion  of  their  own  wholly  distinct  from 
the  secretion  of  the  pancreas  itself,  which 
flows  off  to  the  intestine  through  its  duct. 
Disease  of  these  islands  causes  bread,  the 
staff  of  life,  to  become  highly  poisonous, 
because  such  disease  causes  that  mortal 
derangement,  diabetes.  But  a  most  pe- 

*  The  reader  may  consult  my  monograph  on  Graves' 
Disease,  with  and  without  Exophthalmic  Goitre  (Wm. 
Wood  &  Co.,  New  York,  1904),  which  was  written  to  show 
that  the  Thyroid  is  not  primarily  but  only  secondarily 
affected  in  this  disease,  a  fact  which  has  important  bear- 
ings on  its  treatment.  Also  my  article  on  Graves'  Dis- 
ease and  its  treatment,  in  the  March,  1908,  number  of 
the  American  Journal  of  Medical  Sciences. 

145 


WHAT   IS   PHYSICAL  LIFE 

culiar  fact  is  that  if  a  collection  of  cells 
from  these  islands,  not  larger  than  a  pea, 
be  engrafted  in  another  part  of  the  body 
where  they  will  grow,  no  diabetes  will  fol- 
low, though  the  pancreas  itself  be  re- 
moved. We  can  guess  from  this  why 
diabetes  is  the  most  insoluble  problem  in 
medicine. 

We  now  pass  on  to  take  up  the  adrenals, 
those  small  organs  whose  experimental  re- 
moval kills  much  more  quickly  than  the 
removal  of  the  kidneys  themselves. 

For  the  nervous  system  to  make  glands 
seems  rather  a  come  down,  to  be  justified 
only  by  the  high  and  important  rank  of  the 
structures  so  originated.  But  we  may 
expect  anything  out  of  the  way  in  the  per- 
formances of  the  Great  Sympathetic,  that 
third  great  nervous  system  in  us  which 
we  know  to  be  more  closely  related  to  our 
vitality  than  the  spinal  cord  and  the  brain 
put  together.  But  so  mysterious  are  the 
146 


ADAPTATIONS 

doings  of  the  Great  Sympathetic  that 
physicians  do  not  often  mention  it  because 
they  know  so  little  for  certain  about  it, 
except  that  it  holds  very  important  re- 
lations to  the  chemistry  of  the  living  body, 
while  to  its  nerves  is  committed  the  great 
office  of  regulating  the  supply  of  the  blood 
to  every  part  as  it  is  needed.  Thus  the 
stomach  needs  about  nine  times  more  blood 
when  it  is  digesting  than  when  it  is  empty. 
As  food  enters  it,  its  vasomotor  nerves 
as  they  are  called,  which  ramify  on  the 
coats  of  the  arteries  and  which  are  derived 
from  the  sympathetic,  relax  the  stomach 
arteries  to  flush  all  its  secreting  glands, 
and  then  when  it  is  empty  they  shut  the 
supply  off.  Without  this  incessant  nerv- 
ous regulation  of  the  blood-vessels  we 
should  soon  cease  to  live,  because  were  the 
great  arteries  in  the  abdomen  to  relax  they 
could  hold  all  the  blood  of  the  body.  This 
sometimes  occurs  with  a  quickly  fatal  re- 
147 


WHAT   IS   PHYSICAL   LIFE 

suit.  Hence  we  are  always  uncomfort- 
able if  these  sympathetic  nerves  are  irreg- 
ular in  their  duty.  Thus  a  sunstroke  so 
injures  the  sympathetic  in  the  neck  that 
for  years  the  patient's  head  and  face  flush 
on  the  slightest  provocation.  Now  these 
vasomotor  nerves  lose  all  power  to  regu- 
late the  arteries  if  the  adrenal  glands  are 
out  of  commission.  And  the  reason  seems 
to  be  this:  That  early  in  embryonic  life 
a  twig  of  the  renal  (kidney)  plexus  of  the 
sympathetic  becomes  rolled  on  itself  like 
a  ball  of  twine.  In  time  it  breaks  off  from 
its  parent  stem,  and,  becoming  enclosed 
in  a  capsule,  adheres  to  the  top  of  the 
kidney  as  a  fully  formed  adrenal  gland. 
The  marvellous  thing  then  is  that  these 
adrenals  add  an  internal  secretion  to  the 
blood,  which  contains  a  definite  chemical 
substance  which  combines  with  acids  and 
forms  salts,  and  is  called  adrenalin.  This 
adrenalin  is  virtually  a  drug,  and  as  it 
148 


ADAPTATIONS 

has  been  isolated,  it  is  sold  over  the  counter 
like  any  other  drug  or  medicine,  because 
it  has  many  properties  of  much  value  to 
the  physician.  It  is  also  very  powerful, 
for  only  one  eight-hundredth  of  a  grain  of 
it  will  uncomfortably  raise  the  pressure  of 
the  blood  in  all  the  arteries  of  the  body. 
Now  for  our  present  purpose,  the  fact  is 
interesting  to  state  that  if  the  adrenals 
are  cut  out,  one  cause  for  the  rapid  super- 
vention of  death  is  from  paralysis  of  all 
the  vasomotor  nerves.  Those  nerves  can- 
not act  if  there  be  no  adrenalin  in  the 
blood. 

Moreover,  chronic  disease  of  the  ad- 
renals causes  a  fatal  affection  called  Ad- 
dison's  Disease,  the  patients  finally  dying 
from  pure  weakness.  A  strange  bronzing 
of  the  skin  in  large  patches  also  generally 
accompanies  this  complaint,  which  points 
to  its  connection  with  derangement  of  the 
sympathetic.  Three  patients  with  Addi- 
149 


WHAT   IS   PHYSICAL   LIFE 

son's  disease  I  have  kept  for  a  number  of 
years  from  succumbing  to  it,  by  daily 
doses  of  extracts  of  the  adrenals  of  sheep. 
Here,  therefore,  is  another  adaptation, 
which  would  make  all  the  other  number- 
less adaptations  useless  if  it  alone  were 
wanting. 

In  the  foregoing  brief  review  we  have 
merely  given  examples,  out  of  any  num- 
ber of  others,  of  adaptations  in  the  living 
body,  by  far  the  most  of  which,  if  they 
failed  to  fit  perfectly,  would  involve 
death.  No  satisfactory  account  of  the  ori- 
gin of  any  of  them  has  yet  been  given.  On 
this  one  subject  of  adaptation  the  words 
of  Professor  Kellogg  may  well  apply, 
"  We  are  ignorant,  terribly,  immensely 
ignorant."  *  But  he  sensibly  adds,  "  Our 
work  is  to  learn,  to  observe,  to  experiment, 
to  tabulate,  to  induce,  to  deduce."  They 
must  all  occur  according  to  natural  laws, 

*  Darwinism  To-day,  p.  337. 
150 


ADAPTATIONS 

and  to  investigate  the  operations  of  nat- 
ural laws  is  the  great  and  honorable  prov- 
ince of  Science,  because  she  deals  with 
facts  or  with  reasoning  based  only  on 
facts.  But  in  such  an  infinitely  complex 
problem,  more  so  than  any  in  physics, 
chemistry,  astronomy,  or  in  any  other  sci- 
ence, it  is  no  discredit  to  the  learners  that 
they  still  have  so  much  more  to  learn. 
One  might  as  well  reprimand  a  young 
class  not  through  with  their  primers,  be- 
cause they  could  not  read  and  forthwith 
interpret  one  of  Browning's  poetical  co- 
nundrums in  his  Rienzi. 

But  a  mental  necessity  impels  one  to 
ask,  what  is  back  of  all  these  blind  natural 
laws,  to  make  their  operations  overshadow 
everything  else  for  pure  adaptive  fitness? 
Laws  never  explain  what  makes  them  laws 
any  more  than  the  movements  of  the  hands 
of  a  clock  explain  what  makes  those  hands 
move  so  regularly.  We  know  a  great 
151 


WHAT   IS   PHYSICAL   LIFE 

deal  about  the  laws  of  gravitation,  but  we 
know  nothing  about  gravitation  itself.  So 
the  laws  of  cohesion  render  steel  good 
material  for  making  knives,  but  cohesion 
itself  could  not  make  one  knife.  The  only 
answer  is  that  back  of  all  law  or  laws  is 
the  supreme  reality,  Mind,  and  it  gives  a 
grander  conception  of  that  Reality  when 
this  is  recognized  as  the  cause  of  the  uni- 
form operation  of  blind  natural  laws 
without  once  changing  their  naturalness. 
The  scientist  may  therefore  go  on  in  his 
plodding  investigation  quite  sure  that  he 
will  never  be  troubled  with  an  unnatural 
law. 


152 


CHAPTER    VII 

AS    TO    OUSSELVES 

So  far  in  our  discussion  of  the  problems 
of  Life,  we  have  not  often  gone  beyond 
the  province  of  a  botanist  or  of  a  natural- 
ist. All  that  we  have  said  might  have 
its  illustrations  in  the  life  of  a  cactus,  of 
a  parrot,  or  of  an  antelope,  because  it  is 
only  life  which  we  have  been  investigating, 
and  anything  living  illustrates  life.  But 
all  along  the  way  there  looms  up  as  its 
termination  and  end  that  which  dwarfs 
everything  else,  and  which  was  termed  by 
Huxley  the  Andes  of  Life— Man.*  Until 
the  road  reaches  the  base  of  this  great 
mountain  range,  our  interest  in  it  is  not 
very  exciting.  We  have  been  gathering 
just  so  much  scientific  information  and 

*  Huxley,  The  Place  of  Man  in  Nature,  pp.  119,  132. 
153 


WHAT   IS   PHYSICAL   LIFE 

no  more.  But  so  soon  as  we  find  that  the 
trend  is  towards  a  scientific  demonstra- 
tion of  the  origin  of  Man  himself,  our 
mental  attitude  immediately  changes.  It 
is  now  we  ourselves  who  are  personally 
involved  in  the  discussion,  and  none  the 
less  so  because  we  are  not  to  consider  man 
from  a  metaphysical  or  philosophical  or 
theological  standpoint,  but  only  as  science 
must  regard  him. 

But  even  then  we  feel  that  nothing 
which  we  have  already  passed  quite  pre- 
pares us  for  this  task,  because  not  only 
lofty  heights,  but  also  profound  depths 
lie  before  us,  if  Man  is  to  be  accounted  for. 
He  is  the  problem  of  problems,  every 
proposed  explanation  of  which  proves  to 
be  very  incomplete.  It  is  all  very  well 
to  follow  life  unicellular  to  life  multicellu- 
lar,  and  then  from  forms  now  living  to 
those  long  extinct,  whose  remains  in  the 
earth's  rocky  cemeteries  show  how  all  came 
154 


AS   TO   OURSELVES 

by  continuous  descent  from  primitive 
metazoa — but  then  what  are  We  who  are 
making  this  review? 

Unhappily  we  are  not  like  scientific  be- 
ings from  another  world,  visiting  this 
planet  to  study  its  vital  phenomena,  but 
we  are  ourselves  part  and  parcel  of  that 
which  we  are  investigating.  To  say  the 
least,  this  fact  is  curious,  and  naturally 
suggests  the  question  whether  after  all 
we  are  really  of  this  earth  or  only  by  some 
chance  on  it.  Certainly  this  earth  has  no 
other  self -examining  species. 

But  before  attempting  any  great  ascent, 
much  preliminary  work  is  necessary,  and 
so  here,  following  as  we  should  along  the 
lines  of  the  physical  conditions  entering 
into  the  life  of  man,  we  begin  with  his 
bodily  senses.  It  is  by  them  that  he  comes 
into  relation  with  his  physical  world,  be- 
cause they  afford  the  only  means  by  which 
at  first  he  can  do  so.  He  is  an  inner 
155 


WHAT   IS   PHYSICAL   LIFE 

centric  self  with  the  whole  world  outside 
of  him,  and  so  that  world  would  remain 
but  for  these  special  sense  organs,  which, 
it  should  be  particularly  noted,  are  on 
one  side  so  wholly  physical  that  we  can 
examine  them  with  scalpel  and  microscope, 
but  they  connect  at  the  other  end  with 
what  is  anything  but  physical,  being  in- 
stead wholly  psychical.  It  is  not  the 
physical  eye,  but  only  the  man  himself 
which  sees,  though  without  the  eye  he 
could  not  see  at  all.  Here,  then,  just 
where  each  bodily  sense  reaches  his  con- 
sciousness, is  the  man  himself.  This  is 
where  he  is  at  home,  and  if  we  can  only 
make  his  acquaintance  in  those  private 
quarters,  we  will  learn  more  about  him 
than  we  can  anywhere  else.  Both  meta- 
physics and  philosophy  have  filled  the 
world  with  outside  talk  about  Man,  but 
for  trustworthy  information  give  us  the 
testimony  of  his  five  bodily  senses. 
156 


AS   TO   OURSELVES 

Thus,  beginning  with  the  sense  of  Taste, 
the  lowest  of  human  senses,  since  its  chief 
function  is  to  serve  bodily  nutrition,  we 
find  illustrated  even  here  that  generic  dis- 
satisfaction in  man  with  narrow  limita- 
tions. This  impatience  with  limitations  is 
our  first  private  information  about  man, 
and  we  are  never  going  to  hear  the  last 
of  it.  For  though  the  ass  knoweth  his 
master's  crib  and  is  satisfied  with  its 
healthy  but  monotonous  diet,  at  a  man's 
banquet,  where  his  range  of  taste  is  illus- 
trated, the  air  above,  the  earth  beneath, 
and  the  waters  under  the  earth  are  all 
called  upon  to  furnish  things  for  that 
table.  The  commerce  of  the  world  draws 
largely  upon  the  products  of  every  clime 
and  region  of  the  globe  to  supply  what 
men  like  to  taste.  He  would  be  well 
versed  in  geography  who  could  tell  where 
every  article  came  from  on  the  table  of 
one  of  our  ordinary  mechanics.  But  the 
157 


WHAT   IS    PHYSICAL   LIFE 

creature  at  the  crib  has  quite  a  sufficient 
reason  for  being  content  with  his  unvary- 
ing food,  namely,  because  he  is  an  ass ! 

JBut  the  same  discontent  with  what  he 
has  got  Man  shows  with  all  his  other 
senses.  None  of  them  come  up  to  what 
he  requires  of  them.  The  other  animals, 
all  of  whom  have  the  same  sense  organs 
that  he  has,  find  these  perfectly  satis- 
factory for  all  their  wants,  but  man  finds 
his  to  be  such  poor  instruments  for  him 
that  he  has  to  supplement  the  most  im- 
portant of  them  with  devices  of  his  own 
making.  For  he  demands  of  his  bodily 
senses  what  no  other  creature  would  think 
of  asking:  things  to  be  seen  which  no  eye 
was  ever  made  to  see,  nor  ear  to  hear,  nor 
touch  to  feel.  Finally,  in  his  insatiable 
quest  for  information  he  parts  company 
with  his  sense  organs  altogether,  with  the 
result,  as  we  shall  see,  of  incalculable  ad- 
ditions to  his  knowledge. 
158 


AS   TO   OURSELVES 

All  this  is  particularly  well  illustrated 
in  the  case  of  the  Eye,  for  we  may  here 
appropriately  quote  the  remarks  of  its 
most  distinguished  scientific  investigator, 
Hermann  von  Helmholtz,*  who  says,  p. 
201 :  "  Of  all  our  members,  the  eye  has 
always  been  held  the  choicest  gift  of 
Nature — the  most  marvellous  product 
of  her  plastic  force.  Poets  and  orators 
have  celebrated  its  praises;  philosophers 
have  extolled  it  as  a  crowning  instance  of 
perfection  in  an  organism,  and  opticians 
have  tried  to  imitate  it  as  an  unsurpassed 
model." 

But  after  enumerating  the  many  fea- 
tures of  its  mechanisms  with  their  expla- 
nations, he  proceeds,  p.  219:  "Now  it  is 
not  too  much  to  say  that  if  an  optician 
wanted  to  sell  me  an  instrument  which 
had  all  these  defects,  I  should  think  myself 

*  H.  von  Helmholtz,  Popular  Lectures  on  Scientific  Sub- 
jects, Appleton  &  Co.,  New  York,  1873. 

159 


WHAT   IS    PHYSICAL   LIFE 

quite  justified  in  blaming  his  carelessness 
in  the  strongest  terms  and  giving  him  back 
his  instrument.  Of  course  I  shall  not  do 
this  with  my  eyes,  and  shall  be  only  too 
glad  to  keep  them  as  long  as  I  can — 
defects  and  all.  Still,  the  fact  that 
however  bad  they  may  be,  I  can  get  no 
others,  does  not  at  all  diminish  their 
defects." 

Helmholtz  is  here  speaking  of  the  eye 
only  as  an  optical  instrument  used  for  the 
ordinary  purposes  of  life,  and  for  these  he 
finds  it  abounding  in  deficiencies.  He  does 
not  allude  at  all  to  its  utter  inadequacy  as 
a  help  for  us  to  go  beyond  our  customary 
world.  But  ordinarily  no  one's  eye  recog- 
nizes anything  clearly  within  eight,  and 
with  many,  ten,  inches  of  his  eyeball. 
What  is  there  to  see  within  that  distance? 
Not  until  a  microscope  was  made  could 
any  one  tell.  It  is  a  mistake,  however,  to 
suppose  that  this  artificial  supplement  to 
160 


AS   TO   OURSELVES 

the  eye  ever  magnifies  anything.  When 
we  cross  a  street  in  order  to  read  a  sign  we 
have  not  magnified  its  letters  by  doing  so. 
We  have  simply  brought  our  eyes  nearer 
to  them.  And  that  is  all  that  a  microscope 
does.  A  three-inch  glass  brings  our  eyes 
to  that  distance  of  the  object  we  are  look- 
ing at.  An  inch  and  a  half  glass  brings 
us  so  much  nearer,  and  if  then  with  a  direct 
illumination  we  look  at  the  centre  of  a 
common  verbena  flower,  strings  upon 
strings  of  more  gorgeously  colored  pearls 
than  any  jeweller  can  show,  appear  to  our 
admiring  gaze.  All  this  shows  that  the 
eyes  which  we  brought  with  us  at  birth  do 
not  see  a  tithe  of  the  beauties  of  Nature. 
With  a  microscope  not  much  better  than 
this,  Leeuwenhoek,  in  1675,  frightened  the 
world  by  saying  that  more  animals  live  in 
our  mouths  than  there  were  people  in  Hol- 
land I  But  with  object  glasses  of  higher 
powers  we  are  said  to  see  things  magnified 
161 


WHAT  IS  PHYSICAL  LIFE 
200,  500,  1,000,  or  2,000  diameters,  which 
only  means  that  different  objectives,  as 
they  are  called,  bring  our  eyes  within  1-4, 
or  1-8,  or  1-12,  or  1-15,  or  1-25  of  an  inch 
of  the  object. 

And  what  have  these  mechanical  devices 
of  ours  for  helping  our  eyes  to  see,  not 
done  for  the  human  world?  So  impor- 
tant to  all  life  is  that  living  world 
about  which  our  native  eyes  would  never 
have  given  us  the  least  information, 
that  it  is  evident  that  no  physical  instru- 
ment can  suffice  for  man,  because  he  is  so 
much  greater  than  anything  physical.  All 
eyes  made  of  protoplasm,  including  the 
eyes  of  the  anthropoid  apes,  belong  only 
to  low  origins  and  levels,  but  this  mineral 
made  microscope  belongs  to  the  Andean 
heights  of  Mind. 

However,  we  have  still  other  reasons 
for  dissatisfaction  with  our  eyes.  They 
see  Canopus,  the  second  brightest  star  in 


AS   TO   OURSELVES 

the  heavens,  as  no  larger  than  a  bright 
jewel  in  a  lady's  necklace,  though  we  know 
that  since  that  star  has  no  proper  motion, 
as  astronomers  say,  it  must  be  immeasu- 
rably distant,  and  for  it  then  to  shine  so 
splendidly,  it  is  very  probably  more  than 
a  hundred  thousand  times  larger  and  a 
hundred  thousand  times  brighter  than  our 
own  sun.  But  our  poor  eye  can  now  an- 
swer: You  know  that  I  do  not  report  the 
exact  truth  to  you  about  anything.  You 
should  not  trust  me  so,  because,  owing  to 
radical  defects  in  my  make-up,  I  tell  you 
that  a  man  six  feet  high  is  only  six  inches 
high  when  he  is  a  mile  off.  And  as  to  the 
stars,  you  have  had  to  make  a  telescope  to 
help  me  out,  but  even  with  its  aid  the  fixed 
stars  remain  beyond  me,  for  I  then  see 
them  as  merely  shining  points.  It  is  not 
by  me,  but  by  that  greater  power  than 
mine  in  you,  your  Reason,  that  you  learn 
not  only  how  large  Canopus  is,  but  also  by 
163 


WHAT   IS   PHYSICAL   LIFE 

another  of  your  contrivances,  that  Cano- 
pus  abounds  in  earthly  materials. 

We  must  leave  for  the  present,  other 
important  lessons  from  the  serious  imper- 
fections of  this  sense  organ,  to  take  up  the 
Ear,  only  mentioning  what  is  the  most  im- 
portant fact  of  all,  viz.,  that  it  is  not  the 
faculty  of  sight  itself  which  is  imperfect 
in  us,  but  solely  the  instrument  of  that 
faculty  which  is  so.  If  the  faculty  itself 
were  deficient,  we  could  not  ourselves 
help  it  with  anything,  whether  telescope  or 
microscope,  any  more  than  we  could  help 
a  man  who  had  never  learned  to  read,  by 
giving  him  a  pair  of  spectacles.  The 
faculty  belongs  to  us  and  not  to  our  eyes, 
nor  to  our  brains  either,  as  we  shall  find 
further  on. 

The  Ear  is  worse  off  than  the  eye  in  the 

narrowness  of  the  range  of  the  medium 

through  which  it  catches  sounds.    While 

the  eye  responds  to  the  vibrations  of  light 

164. 


AS   TO   OURSELVES 

which  travel  188,000  miles  a  second,  the 
vibrations  of  sound  travel  only  1,100  feet 
a  second.  Sounds,  therefore,  soon  die 
away  in  the  distance,  nor  can  a  thousand 
voices  singing  together  go  much  farther 
than  one  voice  does,  the  same  as,  if  instead 
of  singing  the  crowd  were  throwing  stones, 
but  a  few  of  the  stones  would  go  beyond 
the  average  distance  of  the  rest.  Never- 
theless, the  ear  possesses  certain  intrinsic 
advantages  over  the  eye.  Instead  of  the 
constantly  mistaken  information  which 
the  eye  gives,  the  ear  is  always  accurate 
and  truthful.  Hence  it  was  a  great  ad- 
vance in  medicine  to  enlist  its  aid  in  aus- 
cultation. It  fails  in  our  species  only  in 
its  report  of  the  direction  of  sounds,  be- 
cause for  that  purpose  we  have  no  mov- 
able external  ears  such  as  those  of  the  rab- 
bits and  the  equines.  Unlike  the  eye, 
which  chiefly  informs  the  mind,  the  ear 
stirs  the  emotions.  We  can  see  a  fish 
165 


WHAT   IS   PHYSICAL   LIFE 

writhing  in  its  death  agony  without  pity, 
but  no  one  can  so  listen  to  an  animal's 
shrieks  of  pain.  This  is  as  it  should  be, 
for  however  wrong  the  head,  the  heart 
should  keep  right.  The  ear  also  is  in- 
tensely personal.  It  makes  no  mistakes 
about  the  identity  of  the  voice  it  hears. 
Once,  on  the  deck  of  a  Glasgow  steamer,  I 
parted  from  a  student  friend,  and  we  did 
not  meet  again  for  thirty-three  years.  I 
could  never  have  known  him  then  by  sight, 
for  time  sadly  spoils  eye  memories,  but  his 
voice  told  me  who  he  was  the  moment  he 
spoke.  All  such  facts  reveal  why  through 
the  ear  the  prof  oundest  depths  of  being  are 
reached,  because  for  some  persons  Music, 
instead  of  being  only  sounds  proceeding 
from  tongue,  lips,  or  instruments,  is  to 
them  the  speech  itself  of  the  innermost 
soul.  Beethoven  composed  some  of  his 
finest  symphonies  after  he  had  become 
stone-deaf. 

160 


AS   TO   OURSELVES 

Nor  has  that  great  being  who  is  back 
of  each  sense  organ  failed  to  remedy  the 
deficiencies  of  the  ear  even  more  won- 
drously  than  those  of  the  eye.  I  was 
once  told  that  a  gentleman  wished  to 
speak  to  me,  and  on  my  asking  what  he 
wanted  his  voice  trembled  as  he  said  that 
his  child  had  pneumonia.  As  his  physi- 
cian was  with  him  we  three  then  alternately 
spoke,  and  though  they  were  hundreds  of 
miles  away,  I  could  distinguish  their 
different  voices  as  readily  as  if  we  were 
actually  together.  It  was  by  means  of 
an  electrified  wire  that  the  ear  heard 
personal  voice  and  tone  transmitted  a 
thousand  times  farther  and  faster  than 
waves  of  air  could  vibrate.  But  what  is 
that  marvel  compared  with  wireless  teleph- 
ony? Here  is  man  bidding  that  mysteri- 
ous ether  which  pervades  the  whole  uni- 
verse to  become  a  human  voice  speaking  to 
a  human  ear! 

167 


WHAT   IS   PHYSICAL   LIFE 

But  far  and  away  the  Queen  of  our 
senses,  and  higher  in  rank  than  eye  or  ear, 
is  our  sense  of  Touch,  because  it  is  the 
only  one  of  our  senses  which  endows  us 
with  entirely  new  capacities.  Yet  it  is  so 
only  in  the  human  being,  because  in  him 
alone  can  it  do  what  it  does  in  raising  Man 
to  the  rank  of  a  true  Creator,  or  one  who 
gives  origin  to  things  which  would  not 
exist  but  for  his  intelligent  purpose  and 
design.  With  these  new  capacities  we  can 
do  what  we  please  with  anything  physical 
on  this  physical  earth.  Thus  a  large  audi- 
ence may  be  spellbound  by  a  famous  vio- 
linist who  seems  to  make  his  instrument 
sweetly  talk.  It  all  then  looks  so  easy. 
He  has  no  more  fingers  than  I  have,  but 
if  I  should  take  that  instrument  in  hand 
it  would  utter  nothing  but  lamentable 
squeaks.  So  another  musician  commands 
a  high  price  for  each  night's  performance 
on  the  piano,  because  he  has  acquired  such 
168 


AS   TO   OURSELVES 

a  marvellous  touch  of  its  keys.  But 
Civilization  is  out  with  her  greatest  shows 
on  this  occasion.  The  women  there  are 
simply  indescribable  for  what  they  display 
in  dress  and  ornament,  and  yet  not  an 
item  of  either  would  be  procurable  but  for 
skilled  handicraft.  So  the  great  hall  itself 
and  everything  in  it,  whether  for  use  or 
for  embellishment,  has  been  made  by 
skilled  handicraft. 

But  what  is  skilled  handicraft?  It  is 
that  which  produces  work  according  to  a 
special  training  in  each  case  of  the  sense 
of  touch.  It  is  not  the  eye  which  can 
make  a  microscope,  nor  the  ear  a  trumpet. 
Practically  it  is  the  insensate  hand  made 
intelligent  and  guided  by  a  human  person- 
ality which  suffices  for  everything.  With 
a  human  personality,  the  sense  of  touch 
can  take  the  place  of  the  seeing  of  the  eye 
and  of  the  hearing  of  the  ear,  when  these 
can  no  longer  do  either.  Helen  Keller 
169 


WHAT   IS    PHYSICAL   LIFE 

lost  in  infancy  every  seeing  and  hearing 
brain  cell,  but  by  the  sense  of  touch  she 
has  become  a  highly  educated  woman, 
versed  in  the  literatures  of  ancient  and  of 
modern  languages,  and  an  accomplished 
authoress  as  well. 

Yet  the  sense  of  touch  itself  does  not 
count,  since  a  number  of  animals  have  a 
more  sensitive  touch  than  we  have,  but  this 
delicate  feeling  in  them  falls  so  far  short 
of  reaching  a  human  consciousness,  that 
were  all  animals  to  unite  in  the  attempt, 
they  would  still  fail  to  make  one  ordinary 
pin.  Without  the  human  mind  there  can 
be  no  handicraft. 

It  is  this  bodily  sense  activating  the 
hand  which  most  reveals  what  man  is  and 
what  he  can  do,  for  as  the  ancients  said, 
feeling  reaches  the  heart  of  being.  In 
comparison,  matter  now  sinks  to  insignifi- 
cance. Like  all  other  senses,  touch  as- 
cends to  the  brain  by  its  afferent  nerves 
170 


AS   TO   OURSELVES 

and  reaches  there  that  Great  Reality  which 
by  its  efferent  nerves  tells  the  human  hand 
to  turn  and  deal  with  the  properties  and 
the  forces  of  matter  as  it  wills.  Thus  one 
can  now  take  passage  from  the  New  York 
Central  Depot,  and  in  twenty  minutes 
pass  through  seven  miles  of  the  subway 
which  runs  under  the  streets  of  two  cities 
and  under  a  river  on  which  great  steamers 
ply.  Matter  enough  had  to  be  handled  ere 
the  way  was  finished,  but  the  designer 
decreed  beforehand  how  every  shovelful 
was  to  be  removed.  Also  the  marvellous 
bridge  which  spans  the  river  overhead 
existed  down  to  its  last  wire  and  bolt,  in 
the  mind  of  the  great  engineer  who 
planned  it  before  any  part  of  it  existed  on 
earth.  But  we  need  not  go  on,  for  the 
whole  earth  is  filled  with  the  glory  of  man 
by  his  handiwork. 

To  some  all  this  sounds  trite  enough, 
because  everybody  knows  that  man  has  a 
171 


WHAT   IS    PHYSICAL   LIFE 

wonderful  mind.  But  just  because  every 
one  knows  this,  the  important  scientific 
aspect  of  the  subject  is  overlooked  alto- 
gether. For  as  Science  rates  other  animals 
according  both  to  their  bodily  structure 
and  their  degree  of  intelligence,  so  she 
should  scientifically  account  for  the  whole 
of  man,  for  his  mind  no  less  than  for  his 
body.  Science  might  as  well  limit  her  ob- 
servations to  his  skin  as  to  neglect  ex- 
plaining how,  on  her  principles,  his  mind 
naturally  fits  into  her  scheme  of  the  de- 
velopment of  life  on  earth.  The  fact  that 
he  has  an  exceptional  mind  does  not  ab- 
solve her  from  a  scientific  explanation  of 
that  fact.  In  the  rest  of  her  ascending 
series  of  animal  forms,  Science  has  no  trou- 
ble with  any  member  of  them,  not  except- 
ing the  chimpanzee.  In  him  she  finds  that 
his  mind  or  intelligence  corresponds  to  his 
brain,  and  vice  versa.  But  with  the  next 
primate,  man,  an  immeasurable  gap  oc- 
172 


AS   TO   OURSELVES 

curs,  not  between  the  body  or  the  brain  of 
either,  for  in  both  these  respects  the  two 
are  similar,  but  there  is  a  gap  in  intelli- 
gence for  which  there  is  no  measure.  It 
requires  some  thinking  adequately  to  esti- 
mate how  great  that  gap  is,  and  we  have 
been  trying  by  following  the  lines  of  the 
physical  connections  of  man's  bodily  senses 
with  his  mind  to  perceive  how  tremendous 
the  break  really  is. 

Years  ago  I  was  once  officially  engaged 
in  counting  the  assets  of  a  great  bank,  in 
the  course  of  which  I  held  in  my  hand  a 
piece  of  printed  paper,  with  which  had  I 
owned  it  myself  I  could  buy  the  cattle  on  a 
thousand  hills.  But  had  it  been  offered  to 
any  chimpanzee  who  has  ever  been  evolved, 
to  choose  between  that  piece  of  paper  and 
a  cocoanut,  the  cocoanut  would  have  been 
reached  for  every  time.  The  nut  and 
the  paper  belonged  to  two  worlds  of  things 
infinitely  apart. 

173 


WHAT  IS  PHYSICAL  LIFE 
The  fundamental  distinction  between  the 
two  lies  in  the  transcendent  fact  that  Man 
is  a  person,  something  which  no  other  ani- 
mal is.  A  person  living  in  a  world  of  per- 
sons shows  in  his  most  ordinary  common- 
place acts  that  there  can  be  no  real  identity 
between  himself  and  animals.  Writing  a 
letter  and  then  dropping  it  into  a  street 
mail  box  implies  these  differences  from  the 
denizens  of  a  cocoanut  grove:  a  city  with 
everything  which  makes  a  city;  a  great 
country  where  government  provides  post 
offices  by  which  letters  may  go  anywhere 
if  properly  stamped ;  the  faculty  of  speech 
expressed  now  not  by  mouth  but  by  a 
typewriting  machine  on  its  special  letter 
paper.  How  can  biology  explain  any  of 
these  things?  The  most  brilliant  discov- 
eries made  by  biologists  have  not  been 
made  in  man,  but  in  worms,  as  by  Wilson 
in  annelids,  and  by  Boveri  in  ascarides. 
These  biologists  could  not  have  done  bet- 


AS   TO   OURSELVES 

ter,  with  such  a  great  subject  as  animal 
life,  than  to. begin  with  the  simpler  forms. 
But  there  can  be  nothing  in  common  be- 
tween man  and  worms,  except  that  both 
have  animal  bodies.  What  we  insist  upon 
is  that  nothing  bodily  accounts  for  per- 
sonality. 

At  the  next  stage  in  our  ascent  new 
heights  appear  which  overtop  anything 
yet  encountered.  So  far  man  has  been 
content  to  keep  company  with  his  physical 
senses,  and  when  they  grew  weak  to  supply 
them  with  divers  inventions  of  his  to  help 
them  keep  up  with  him.  But  now  he  pro- 
poses to  leave  them  all  behind,  because 
they  can  only  start  him  on  his  journey, 
something  like  a  convenient  cab  which 
brings  him  to  the  railroad  station.  They 
cannot  also  be  to  him  like  the  express  train 
which  is  to  transport  him  to  some  far-off 
destination  in  the  great  continent  of 
knowledge.  Ere  long  he  will  part  with 
175 


WHAT   IS    PHYSICAL  LIFE 

the  imagination  also,  because  it  is  too  weak 
a  faculty  now,  since  it  can  make  its  pic- 
tures only  out  of  materials  which  the 
bodily  senses  furnish.  A  surer  and  more 
powerful  agency  than  either  the  senses  or 
the  imagination  is  henceforth  to  carry 
him  on,  namely,  his  Understanding,  that 
oldest  and  best  name  for  the  human  Rea- 
son. The  scientist  walks  by  reason  and 
not  by  sight.  If  he  be  a  chemist  he  busies 
himself  only  with  molecules,  atoms,  and 
ions,  each  one  of  these  things  being  much 
larger  than  the  other.  I  heard  a  pro- 
fessor of  organic  chemistry  enthusiasti- 
cally remark  that  he  had  met  with  such  a 
huge  molecule  among  the  sugars,  that  if 
only  he  could  multiply  it  twenty-five  times 
he  could  then  see  it  with  a  microscope! 
But  no  one  has  yet  seen,  or  detected  by  any 
bodily  sense  whatever,  a  single  molecule, 
still  less  an  atom,  and  far  less  an  ion  which 
is  a  hundred  thousand  times  smaller  than 
176 


AS   TO  OURSELVES 

an  atom.  Then  in  the  realm  of  pure 
physics  all  these  things  are  also  talked 
about  until  we  finally  hear  about  little  else 
than  the  Ether,  that  wonderful  something 
which  not  the  most  vivid  imagination  can 
connect  with  a  bodily  sense.  Then  when 
further  progress  in  this  direction  slackens, 
the  motor  of  mathematics  is  attached. 
Helmholtz  regretted  that  Faraday,  not 
being  a  mathematician  like  Clerk  Max- 
well, may  have  failed  on  that  account  to 
achieve  still  greater  triumphs  in  physics 
than  those  which  have  made  his  name  im- 
mortal. But  where  do  we  find  ourselves 
now?  Science  can  give  only  the  same  an- 
swer with  Philosophy — we  are  in  the 
realm  of  pure  mind.  Back  of  anything 
physical,  and  greater  than  anything  physi- 
cal, is  the  great  fact  of  facts,  Mind!  And 
is  not  Mind  to  be  found  elsewhere  in  this 
Universe  than  on  this  little  earth? 

This    last    question    suggests    another 
177 


WHAT  IS  PHYSICAL  LIFE 
which  is  not  easy  to  answer,  and  that  is, 
why  men  naturally  disbelieve  in  the  exist- 
ence of  anything  if  it  be  not  testified  to 
directly  by  their  bodily  senses?  Despite 
all  evidences  of  the  imperfections,  if  not 
of  the  untrustworthiness  of  those  senses, 
most  people  will  promptly  reject  whatever 
is  not  certified  to  by  them,  as  if  they  con- 
stitute the  sole  foundations  of  belief. 
Reason  may  then  protest,  but  she  protests 
in  vain. 

All  this  is  well  illustrated  by  the  history 
of  one  great  word,  which  like  many  simi- 
lar words  we  owe  to  that  remarkable  race 
which  once  appeared,  as  biologists  would 
say,  like  a  human  sport  in  the  small  coun- 
try of  Greece.  Such  sports  in  Nature 
arise,  no  one  knows  why  or  how,  and  cer- 
tainly it  is  not  easy  to  account  for  the 
wonderful  variety  of  intellectual  gifts 
which  the  ancient  Greeks  possessed.  Thus 
our  English  language  testifies  to  the  lusty, 
178 


AS   TO   OURSELVES 

vigor  of  our  ancestors,  for  when  we  would 
speak  or  write  strongly  we  rather  use 
plain,  short  Anglo-Saxon  words.  But  so 
soon  as  we  wish  to  think  clearly  or  scien- 
tifically, we  have  to  ask  the  old  Greeks,  as 
the  Romans  did  wholesale  before  us,  to 
lend  us  their  words,  philosophy,  theology, 
metaphysics,  logic,  theory,  hypothesis,  an- 
alysis, synthesis,  music,  and  harmony;  or 
physics,  mathematics,  arithmetic,  circle, 
diameter,  periphery,  parallel,  astronomy, 
geometry,  geography,  biology,  physiology, 
and  all  other  ologies;  botany,  chemistry, 
molecule,  atom,  ion,  etc.,  etc.  In  fact  our 
philosophy  and  our  science  would  both 
come  to  a  standstill  if  they  had  to  speak 
only  in  English. 

Now  one  splendid  Greek  word  for 
whose  irreparable  loss  the  later  Greeks 
were  themselves  to  blame,  was  the  word 
skepticism.  The  original  Greek  noun,  a 
skeptic,  meant  a  thoughtful,  reflecting 
179 


WHAT   IS   PHYSICAL   LIFE 

man,  an  inquirer  after  facts  or  reasons, 
from  the  verb  to  look  carefully  around  and 
to  consider.  Socrates  claimed  to  be  a 
skeptic,  because  he  held  his  judgment  in 
suspense  until  he  could  decide  according  to 
reasons.  But  in  the  course  of  barely  three 
centuries  this  fine  stock  of  men  died  out, 
and  were  succeeded  by  what  our  Western 
cattle-growers  would  call  a  breed  of  runts. 
Instead  of  the  like  of  Socrates,  Plato,  and 
Aristotle,  there  arose  a  set  called  Pyr- 
rhonists  wrho  made  skepticism  synony- 
mous with  its  wretched  counterfeit,  In- 
credulity, and  it  has  retained  this  ignoble 
meaning  ever  since,  leaving  the  word  in  its 
original  sense  as  dead  and  gone  as  the 
great-minded  race  of  men  who  first  made 
it.  It  was  reserved  for  a  man  of  another 
people,  who  when  writing  to  Greeks  thus 
defined  the  duty  of  a  true  skeptic, — Prove 
all  things — and  then  hold  fast  to  that 
which  is  good. 

180 


AS   TO   OURSELVES 

Now  the  contrasts  between  true  skepti- 
cism and  incredulity  are  these.  Skepticism 
is  deliberate,  distrustful  of  appearances, 
grave,  and  candid.  Incredulity  needs  no 
thought,  but  is  peremptory  and  scornful, 
and  not  being  reasonable  it  cannot  be  rea- 
soned with.  The  one  is  a  high  and  strong 
mental  virtue,  because  it  acknowledges  no 
authority  but  that  of  reason.  The  other  is 
a  sign  of  mental  debility,  since  the  sup- 
posed verdict  of  the  bodily  senses  is  its 
all-sufficient  authority.  Because  intrin- 
sically they  are  of  the  same  nature,  both 
credulity  and  incredulity  may  be  found  in 
the  same  person.  There  are  those  who 
contemptuously  brush  aside  the  greatest 
achievements  of  medical  science  as  they 
would  a  gnat,  and  then  readily  swallow  a 
whole  line  of  camels  laden  with  the  cures 
of  so-called  Christian  Science.  Incredu- 
lity was  illustrated  by  a  king  of  Siam  who 
angrily  ordered  a  traveller  out  of  his  pres- 
181 


WHAT   IS   PHYSICAL   LIFE 

ence  because  he  said  that  in  his  country 
the  water  became  so  hard  in  winter  that 
elephants  could  walk  upon  it.  So  when  I 
stated  to  some  Arabs  that  the  earth  re- 
volved on  its  axis,  they  sneered  as  they 
pointed  to  the  sea  and  asked  if  it  would  not 
all  be  spilled  when  the  earth  turned  over. 
Once,  while  talking  to  a  roomful  of  the 
naturally  bright  people  of  a  town  in  Mt. 
Hermon  about  the  achievements  of  West- 
ern civilization,  I  happened  to  tell  a  tooth- 
less old  man  present  that  in  our  country 
we  had  skilled  persons  who  could  make  for 
him  an  entirely  new  set  of  teeth.  Glancing 
round  the  room,  I  noticed  some  listeners 
stroking  their  beards  in  a  fashion  which 
I  knew  meant  that  I  was  telling  a  pre- 
posterous yarn.  Fortunately  I  had  with 
me  an  elderly  Scotch  friend  who  had  a  set 
of  false  teeth,  and  on  explaining  the  situa- 
tion to  him,  he  forthwith  opened  his  mouth 
and  pulled  the  whole  set  out.  The  Arabs 
,182 


AS   TO   OURSELVES 

jumped  to  their  feet  in  fright,  not  sure 
but  he  might  start  to  unscrew  his  head 
next,  for  had  any  of  their  venerated  an- 
cestors ever  seen  such  an  uncanny  per- 
formance with  teeth?  They  afterwards 
solemnly  said  that  never  would  they  have 
believed  this  if  they  had  not  seen  it. 

There  is  the  essence  of  incredulity  the 
world  over,  for  a  common  English  saying 
is,  Only  seeing  is  believing ;  in  other  words, 
we  are  to  believe  most  in  the  reports  of 
that  sense  which  is  more  uniformly  mis- 
taken than  in  any  other.  The  scientist,  and 
particularly  the  biologist,  is  not  sure  about 
what  he  sees  until  he  has  otherwise  tested 
it.  Thus  thirty-three  distinct  varieties  of 
streptococci  have  been  identified  so  far, 
and  though  in  appearance  they  look  ex- 
actly alike,  it  will  make  considerable  dif- 
ference to  a  man  which  one  of  them  hap- 
pens to  get  into  him.  Likewise  all  metazoa 
begin  each  as  a  micrococcus,  and  they  then 
183 


WHAT   IS    PHYSICAL   LIFE 

all  look  alike  both  outside  and  in,  though 
one  is  to  grow  into  an  ox,  the  other  into 
a  guinea  pig,  the  other  into  an  onion,  and 
the  other,  it  may  be,  into  a  professor  of 
biology.  Some  powerful  living  things 
which  we  have  spoken  of  have  not  yet  been 
seen  at  all.  Now  it  is  not  that  scientists 
underrate  the  senses,  but  knowing  their 
limitations  they  never  allow  them  to  con- 
tradict reason,  however  sense-born  incredu- 
lity remains  impatient  of  contradiction. 

But  the  despotism  of  incredulity  is  most 
strikingly  shown  by  the  attitude  of  multi- 
tudes on  the  subject  of  the  existence  of 
mind.  If  only  they  could  see  mind,  then 
they  would  be  sure  of  its  real  existence. 
Every  other  evidence  of  mind,  from  an  im- 
posing cathedral  to  the  equipments  of  a 
great  university,  leaves  them  still  in  doubt 
as  to  what  mind  is,  including  what  their 
own  minds  are.  May  it  not  be  simply  an 
attribute  of  matter  which  we  can  see  and 
184 


AS   TO   OURSELVES 

touch,  such,  for  example,  as  brain  matter? 
But  modern  medical  science  has  deprived 
them  even  of  this  last  visible  and  tangible 
mental  stuff,  as  it  proves  that  the  brain 
no  more  itself  thinks  than  the  hand  does, 
but,  like  the  hand,  is  nothing  else  than 
the  instrument  of  the  invisible  thinker. 
As  with  the  hands  and  the  feet,  we  have 
two  brains,  but  only  one  of  the  two  is  that 
human  brain  which  is  the  seat  of  all  human 
mental  faculty,  while  its  fellow  is  nothing 
more  than  the  brain  of  the  primate  Homo. 
It  is  the  left  brain  in  right-handed  persons, 
and  the  right  brain  in  the  left-handed, 
which  is  the  brain  of  a  philosopher,  of 
a  statesman,  of  a  poet,  of  an  orator  and 
what  not,  while  its  fellow  knows  not  a 
word,  nor  can  it  recognize  an  object  by 
any  of  the  senses,  nor  conceive  an  idea. 
If  brain  matter  as  such  is  the  source  of 
mind,  then  both  our  brain  hemispheres 
would  be  equally  mental,  when  the  truth 
185 


WHAT   IS   PHYSICAL   LIFE 

is  that  a  man  can  feel  just  where  his  mind 
is  in  his  head  if  he  puts  the  proper  hand 
to  the  other  side  of  his  skull.  How  it 
happens  that  virtually  only  half  our  brain 
matter  is  intelligent,  and  what  that "  how  " 
proves  as  to  ourselves,  is  discussed  at 
length  in  the  author's  book,  Brain  and 
Personality,  and  therefore  need  not  be 
further  detailed  here. 

In  conclusion  we  may  say  that  it  is 
quite  natural  for  many  persons  to  be  per- 
plexed at  the  opposite  deductions  of  scien- 
tific men  on  the  subject  of  the  origin  and 
nature  of  physical  life.  Some  scientific 
authorities  strongly,  if  not  contemptu- 
ously, maintain  that  life  is  a  purely  chem- 
ico-physical  phenomenon  which  some  day 
will  be  so  demonstrated.  The  conception 
that  it  is  not  so,  but  sui  generis,  they  regard 
as  a  lingering  superstitious  myth.  Others 
as  firmly  believe  that  nothing  physico- 
chemical  can  possibly  account  for  life,  and 
186 


AS   TO   OURSELVES 

that  there  is  no  real  evidence  for  such  a 
supposition. 

Now  let  no  one  imagine  that  this  diverg- 
ence of  opinion  can  be  removed  by  Evi- 
dence, because  men  are  not  constituted 
that  way.  Not  by  science  are  men  born 
again,  for  however  scientific  they  be,  they 
remain  the  same  as  the  rest  of  us,  in  that 
their  opinions  are  settled  for  them,  not  by 
evidence,  but  by  Preference,  wherever 
preference  has  anything  to  do  with  a  ques- 
tion. 

Some  may  regard  this  statement  as  a 
humiliating  arraignment  of  human  reason, 
but  whether  humiliating  or  not,  it  is  true. 
Opinions,  the  world  over,  have  little  con- 
nection with  evidence,  so  that  many  of 
them  instead  have  geographical  bound- 
aries. This  of  itself  is  enough,  for  reason 
as  such  has  no  more  connection  with  geog- 
raphy than  with  meteorology.  Opinions, 
on  the  other  hand,  come  usually  from  the 
187 


WHAT   IS   PHYSICAL   LIFE 

interests  engendered  by  circumstances, 
such  as  birthplace,  inheritance,  historical 
influences,  party,  or  sect.  One  would  not 
expect  that  a  native  of  New  England  and 
a  native  of  China  would  have  many 
opinions  in  common.  And  so  the  great 
conflicts  of  history  have  not  been  decided 
by  reasoning.  One  such  conflict  lately  oc- 
curred in  America,  in  which  two  branches 
of  the  same  race,  the  one  as  well  equipped 
with  reasoning  powers  as  the  other,  enter- 
tained such  opposite  opinions  according 
to  the  side  on  which  they  happened  to  be 
born,  of  Mason  and  Dixon's  geographical 
line,  that  finally  their  opinions  were  set- 
tled, not  by  arguments,  but  only  by  pow- 
der and  ball. 

Now  it  happens  that  on  no  subject  in 
the  world  will  opinions  be  found  to  be  so 
determined  ultimately  by  preference,  as 
on  this  subject  of  the  nature  of  physical 
life.  Here  likes  and  dislikes,  and  not  evi- 
188 


AS   TO   OURSELVES 

dence,  shape  everything  both  in  investiga- 
tion and  in  discussion.  The  overpowering 
sway  of  Motive  will  be  made  plain  by  the 
following  considerations. 

As  we  have  seen,  the  problem  of  the 
origin  of  physical  life  finally  ends  with 
the  question,  What  are  we  ourselves?  If 
only  it  ended  before  we  became  included 
in  it,  there  would  have  been  as  little  dis- 
pute as  there  is  in  a  question  about  botany. 
But  as  it  is,  a  now  familiar  answer  to 
this  question  is,  that  we  virtually  are 
things  which  have  come  into  existence 
by  Evolution.  What  this  means  was  ex- 
plained by  Huxley,  and  in  brief  is  as  fol- 
lows: The  doctrine  of  evolution  assumes 
that  in  the  primeval  nebula  from  which 
this  planet  was  evolved,  everything  poten- 
tially existed  which  in  time  would  visibly 
belong  to  it.  As  by  its  own  original  prop- 
erties it  ultimately  would  give  origin  to 
seas  and  continents,  so  by  them  alone  it 
189 


WHAT   IS   PHYSICAL   LIFE 

would  give  origin  to  life,  whose  successive 
forms  would  be  evolved  by  the  interaction 
of  its  own  physical  laws  and  forces.  As 
evolution  knows  of  no  break  or  interven- 
tion, therefore  we  ourselves  are  its  prod- 
ucts also.  Poets,  philosophers,  scientists, 
and  all  other  human  beings  are  samples 
of  things  which  have  thus  come  to  be. 

When  the  Darwinian  theory  was  first 
promulgated,  great  was  the  enthusiasm  of 
its  advocates,  because  it  seemed  to  give  an 
account  of  the  process  of  evolution  fully 
in  keeping  with  the  fundamental  postu- 
lates of  the  doctrine  itself.  We  have  seen 
how  the  astronomer,  Sir  Robert  Ball,  was 
enraptured  with  it  on  that  account.  We 
may  remark,  however,  in  passing,  that  the 
public  has  had  several  recent  illustrations 
of  the  truth  that  astronomers,  as  such,  are 
the  last  persons  who  can  speak  intelli- 
gently about  life,  because  they  deal  with 
nothing  living,  but  only  with  very  distant 
190 


AS   TO   OURSELVES 

physical  bodies,  most  of  which  are  furi- 
ously burning.  To  speak  at  all  about 
physical  life,  they  first  should  walk  on 
this  earth  like  other  people.  But  every 
such  school  of  thought,  whether  astron- 
omers, physicists,  or  biologists,  have  this 
bond  of  union  between  them,  namely,  the 
doctrine  that  we  ourselves  are  things  which 
have  come  into  existence  in  essentially  the 
same  way  as  other  things  do, 

No  contradiction  could  be  greater  than 
that  between  this  doctrine  and  the  greatest 
truth  which  underlies  this  human  world, 
as  it  can  be  expressed  in  these  few  words : 

Things  are  not  responsible,  but  persons 
are. 

Every  person,  however  insignificant  he 
may  seem  to  be,  entails  responsibility  in 
one  way  or  another.  Thousands  of  poor 
immigrants  are  daily  landed  upon  our 
shores,  every  one  of  whom  then  looks  in- 
significant enough.  And  so  they  are  quite 
191 


WHAT   IS   PHYSICAL   LIFE 

forgotten  until  we  find  that  they  have  be- 
come voters,  and  count  just  the  same  as 
ourselves,  so  that  we  pay  heavily  in  taxes 
and  in  misgovernment  for  our  neglect  of 
their  education  and  due  consideration. 
No  person  could  have  appeared  more  in- 
significant than  the  negro  Dred  Scott, 
when  his  case  came  before  the  Supreme 
Court  of  the  United  States.  But  when 
that  court  ruled  that  he  should  be  rated 
only  as  a  saleable  thing,  and  not  as  a  per- 
son, the  most  stable  government  in  the 
world,  whose  money  market  felt  no  jar 
when  either  of  three  of  its  beloved  presi- 
dents was  murdered — that  same  govern- 
ment was  shaken  to  its  very  foundations. 
History  knows  that  the  Dred  Scott  deci- 
sion had  more  immediate  effect  in  bringing 
on  the  terrible  Civil  War  which  followed 
it,  than  did  any  other  one  event. 

But  men  instinctively  feel  that  respon- 
sibility always  circumscribes,  if  it  does  not 
192 


AS   TO   OURSELVES 

rob  them  of  their  personal  independence. 
Every  one  wishes  to  be  responsible  to  him- 
self alone.  It  is  only  for  the  sake  of  his 
own  convenience  that  he  acknowledges  the 
external  authority  of  earthly  governments 
or  police,  or  will  consider  the  opinions  of 
his  fellows.  But  within  he  will  be  free 
and  think  as  he  likes,  and  so  act  when 
possible.  All  this  is  befitting,  for  if  a 
man  is  to  be  called  to  give  a  final  account, 
that  account  should  be  of  himself  alone 
and  of  no  one  else.  But  most  men  prefer 
above  all  else  the  assurance  that  no  such 
account  is  to  be  given.  That  assurance 
would  be  strong  if  only  it  could  be  demon- 
strated that  men  are  nothing  but  things, 
or  even  machines  which  go  as  they  are 
made  to  go.  But  to  make  their  relief 
complete  they  should  also  be  certain  that 
there  is  nothing  in  the  Universe  but  things. 
There  is  no  use,  therefore,  to  continue 
this  discussion,  because  it  will  be  of  no 
193 


WHAT   IS   PHYSICAL   LIFE 

avail  when  preference  is  so  supremely 
dominant. 

But  that  does  not  prevent  us  from  stat- 
ing our  own  preference,  though  from  want 
of  space  we  can  refer  to  but  a  few  out 
of  many  reasons  for  that  preference. 

In  the  first  place,  it  looks  incongruous 
to  us  for  the  advocate  of  this  "thing" 
doctrine  to  put  on  the  ermine  of  Science, 
and  as  Lord  Chancellor  take  the  seat  of 
judgment.  For  he  will  lose  both  title 
and  place  with  this  first  test  case,  which 
is  that  of  one  who  may  think  of  a  person 
as  a  thing  of  molecules,  atoms,  and  ions, 
only  so  long  as  what  he  is  thinking  about 
is  the  other  fellow.  But  so  soon  as  the 
same  question  is  turned  inwards  and  put 
to  his  own  self,  the  conscious  personality 
within  answers  with  an  emphatic,  No! 
Let  any  one  really  try  this  on  himself  and 
he  will  see  that  he,  and  not  molecules,  is 
thinking,  and  that  the  consciousness  of  his 
194 


AS   TO   OURSELVES 

own  personal  existence  is  his  certainty  of 
certainties,  which  will  remain  unshaken  by 
all  warring  theorists  outside. 

Some  persons  regard  any  allusion  to 
mind  as  out  of  place  in  a  scientific  dis- 
cussion, because  science  is  concerned  only 
with  sensible  phenomena,  and  mind  can 
neither  be  tasted,  smelt,  seen,  nor  heard ;  it 
cannot  be  weighed,  analyzed,  resolved, 
precipitated,  measured,  or  spectroscoped. 
But  in  this  enumeration  the  tremendous 
testimony  of  the  greatest  of  the  senses  is 
left  out.  Mind  can  be  felt,  so  vividly 
that  compared  with  it  all  mere  phenomena 
are  what  this  word  originally  meant,  only 
appearances. 

After  all,  the  chief  desire  of  the  thing 
doctrine  advocates  is  the  assurance  of  a 
mindless,  impersonal,  and  mechanically 
produced  universe.  At  all  hazards,  there- 
fore, it  must  be  shown  that  the  mind  of  the 
person,  Man,  is  also  of  mechanical  origin. 
195 


WHAT   IS   PHYSICAL   LIFE 

To  admit  that  man's  mind  is  not  so,  opens 
the  way  to  the  most  far-reaching  conclu- 
sions about  the  relations  of  mind  to  all 
existence.  We  have  already  shown  how 
the  person,  Man,  just  because  he  is  so, 
fills  this  world  with  his  wonderful  crea- 
tions, none  of  which  would  exist  but  for 
his  previously  devising  them.  What 
would  man  create  if,  in  place  of  his  brief 
existence  here,  to  him  belonged  that  time 
which  is  unmeasured  by  the  flight  of  years? 
But  whose  Image  is  now  before  us  ? 

Equally  as  to  his  own  being,  it  is  plain 
that  if  he  is  to  exist  on  this  earth  at  all, 
he  should  have  a  physical  body  to  corre- 
spond. It  is  difficult  to  imagine  how  it 
could  be  otherwise.  If  he  must  eat,  he 

'should  have  a  stomach  like  other  eaters, 
and  likewise,  all  his  bodily  organs  should 
be  in  keeping  with  those  of  the  earthly 
animals  of  his  class.  And  so  we  find  it, 
particularly  in  the  case  of  that  bodily 
196 


AS   TO   OURSELVES 

organ,  the  brain,  for  man's  brain  and  the 
chimpanzee's  are  so  much  alike  that  it 
takes  an  anatomist  to  tell  the  difference. 
But  the  same  conscious  personality  within 
then  says,  I  know  that  I  am  a  real  animal, 
but  I  also  know  that  I  am  infinitely  more 
than  an  animal,  and  there  is  the  end 
of  it 

^Turning  next  to  the  subject  of  Evolu- 
tion, to  find  what  it  really  means,  we  per- 
ceive at  once  that  instead  of  being  an  effi- 
cient cause,  from  the  very  nature  of  the 
case  it  is  no  cause  at  all.  ^  The  running  of  a 
stream  downhill  is  not  the  cause  of  its  so 
running,  for  that  is  the  earth's  attraction 
of  gravitation.  And  just  so  the  long 
stream  of  the  evolution  of  physical  life 
is  not  caused  by  evolntign.y  Science,  there- 
fore, is  quite  right  in  seeking  for  the  cause 
of  evolution,  and  despite  frequent  fail- 
ures hitherto,  she  should  keep  on  in  this 
quest,  for  the  longer  she  does  so  the  less 
197 


WHAT   IS   PHYSICAL   LIFE 

will  we  hear  of  physical  life  being  caused 
by  evolution. 

But  in  the  course  of  this  investigation 
Science  will  encounter  a  fact  which  is  as 
much  a  fact  as  any  other,  and  that  is,  that 
the  human  race,  apparently  because  it  is 
human,  for  no  other  species  shows  a  trace 
of  it,  has  always  had  a  firm  belief  in  the 
existence  of  a  world  unseen  by  human 
eye.  This  we  meet  not  here  arid  there, 
but  everywhere.  Incredulity  is  powerless 
against  this  belief.  The  lowest  savage 
holds  it  so  strongly  that  he  is  sure  the 
most  inanimate  of  objects  has  a  living 
spirit  behind  it.  But  we  have  already 
mentioned  a  truth  about  sight  which  may 
indicate  that  this  fancy  of  the  savage  has 
a  physiological  basis.  The  eye,  by  its 
imperfections  as  an  instrument,  has  too 
often  deceived  him  to  have  him  believe  that 
it  sees  all.  We  know  that  in  this  he  is 
right,  however  mistaken  he  be  as  to  the 
198 


AS   TO   OURSELVES 

objects  which  it  does  not  see,  because  the 
eye  in  us  falls  so  far  short  of  our  faculty 
of  sight  itself  that  we  have  to  make  up 
its  deficiencies  in  all  directions.  And  so 
with  the  other  senses.  In  man  there  is 
no  correspondence  between  faculty  and 
instrument.  Something  more,  and  again 
more,  is  the  persistent  demand  of  the 
personality  within,  when  comparing  the 
boundless  range  of  faculty  with  the  vex- 
atious littleness  of  range  in  the  bodily 
senses.  Nothing  of  the  kind  is  found  in 
other  animals,  for  they  are  as  content  with 
their  sense  organs  as  the  ass  is  with  an 
ass's  diet.  They  never  think  of  going  be- 
yond their  bodily  senses.  But  in  man 
such  an  equipment  of  faculties,  with  such 
poor  provision  for  their  exercise,  is  like 
finding  on  a  canal  boat  engines  which 
originally  must  have  been  meant  for  a 
steamer  which  would  traverse  the  widest 
oceans. 

199 


WHAT   IS    PHYSICAL   LIFE 

What  wonder,  then,  that  this  truth, 
coupled  with  that  of  the  little  speck  of 
time  allowed  on  this  earth  for  the  use  of 
any  faculty,  should  always  have  suggested 
another  life  than  this  to  man?  In  that 
wider  life  who  knows  but  that  Reason's 
present  subordinate  relations  to  the  Will, 
so  that  she  cannot  act  except  as  the  will 
allows,  will  be  reversed,  and  the  will  act 
only  as  reason  prompts.  But  even  now, 
instead  of  asking  the  weak  earthly  imagi- 
nation, let  us  ask  Reason  herself  to  tell  us 
what  the  change  inevitably  would  be  if 
we  entered  another  world  with  our  facul- 
ties still  the  same  that  we  have  here,  but 
with  no  limitations  in  their  use.  With 
sight,  the  farthest  constellations  would  be 
seen,  as  no  earthly  eye  is  made  to  see  them, 
just  as  they  are  in  all  their  glory;  likewise 
the  lineaments  of  every  face  could  be  dis- 
cerned, though  in  an  assembly  of  the  whole 
human  race,  for  distance  would  make  no 
200 


AS   TO   OURSELVES 

difference  there  as  it  does  here.  Again 
the  ear  could  then  hear,  as  no  earthly  ear 
can  hear,  the  personal  voice  of  every  one 
there,  whether  in  speech  or  song.  Above 
all,  the  heart  could  then  feel,  and  move  to 
purpose  and  to  design,  as  it  never  felt 
before. 

These  words  have  a  familiar  sound  to 
us,  because  Paul  used  them  on  this  same 
subject,  but  they  will  be  lost  upon  him 
whose  reasoning  powers  are  paralyzed  by 
imbecile  Incredulity  and  perverse  Will. 


201 


INDEX 


Abiogeneflis,  61 

Acromegaly,  or  deformi- 
ties of  the  skull,  144 

Addison's  disease,  149 

Adrenalin,  148-149 

Adrenals,  146-150}  Ad- 
dison'g  disease  caused  by 
disease  of,  149 

Antitoxins,  49 

Astronomers  the  first  evo- 
lutionist*, 0 

Bacterlej  Ignored  by  writ- 
ers on  biology,  90;  Indis- 
pensable for  removing 
decayed  matter,  72-74; 
largest  division  of  the 
animal  kingdom,  70 ;  uni- 
cellular forms  of  life, 
60-77  5  valuable  for  fer- 
tilizing, 74-77 

Ball,  Sir  Robert?  estimate 
of  the  Darwinian  theory, 
6;  on  spontaneous  gen- 
eration, 7-8 

Bathybius,  imaginary  gen- 
erator of  protoplasm,  23 

Bees,  heredity  in,  63-54 

Biology  adverse  to  the 
Darwinian  theory,  13 

Birds  descended  from  rep- 
tiles, 59 

Blood,  hereditariness  of 
the,  49 


Blood  tests,  50-53 

Brain  the  instrument  of 
the  invisible  thinker,  185 

Bubonic  plague,  65 

Bunge,  Prof.  G.,  on  selec- 
tion of  food-stuffs  by 
body  cell*,  191 

Cancer  common  to  fishes, 
31,  118 

Cancerous  growths,  31-83, 
113-117 

Chemio-taxls,  129^131 

Chitin,  83 

Chromatin  substance,  34,  42 

Consciousness  in  plants, 
124;  an  absurdity,  125 

Creation,  Milton's  concep- 
tion of,  9 

Darwin,  Charles,  Origin  of 

Specie*,  5 

Darwin,  Sir  Francis,  25; 
on  consciousness  in 
plants,  124 

Darwin,  Sir  George,  mat- 
ter not  eternal,  29 
Diabetes,  cause  of,  145-146 
Diatoms,  unicellular  algae, 

79-81 

Differentiation  denned,  98 
Dred  Scott  decision,  192 
Dyer,  Sir  Thistleton,  on  the 
Darwinian  theory,  9 


203 


INDEX 


Ear,  advantages  of,  over 
the  eye,  165-166 

Embryomas,  or  tumors,  32 

Ehrlich,  Prof.,  side  chain 
theory  of  immunity,  126, 
128 

Evolution  not  the  cause  of 
physical  life,  197 

Eye:  adaptations  of,  137; 
Helmholtz  on  the,  159- 
160;  unsatisfactory  in- 
strument, 160-164- 

Eyelids,  mechanism  of, 
134-136 

Fever  a  protective  reac- 
tion, 142 

Food  question,  49,  118-131 
Food-stuffs,  discriminating 
selection    of,    by    body 
cells,  120 

Foraminifera,  81-89 
Future  life,  suggestions  of, 
198-201 

Geology   records   life   his- 
tory of  past  ages,  3 
Graves'  disease,  145 

Haldane,  Prof.  J.  E.:  on 
the  physico-chemical  the- 
ory of  life,  131;  on 
adaptation  of  bodily 
chemistry,  138 

Hartmann,  Prof.,  on  the 
Darwinian  theory,  16 

Helmholtz,  on  the  eye  and 
its  defects,  159-160 

Henslow,  Prof.  G.,  on 
natural  selection,  17 

Hereditary  descent  and  re- 
production inseparable 
from  life,  44,  53 


Hertwig,  Prof.  Oscar  H., 
on  natural  selection,  15 

Hilgard,  Prof.,  on  fer- 
tilizing bacteria,  76 

Hippocrates  on  tuberculo- 
sis, 64 

Hippopotamus  a  modified 
pig,  52 

Huxley:  on  evolution,  189; 
theory  of  bathybius,  22 

Hydra  fusca,  126-128 

Hygiene,  principles  of,  106 

Hymenoptera,  heredity  in, 
53-56 

Immunity,  50,  125-128; 
Ehrlich's  side  chain  the- 
ory of,  126,  128;  Metch- 
nikoff's  cell-eating  the- 
ory of,  128 

Incredulity,  180-184;  con- 
trasted with  skepticism, 

Interdependence  the  abso- 
lute law  in  the  metazoa, 
97,  114 

Islands  of  Langerhans, 
145;  diabetes  caused  by, 
disease  of,  146 

Kala  azar,  East  India 
disease,  78 

Kellogg,  Prof.  V.  L.:  on 
adaptation,  150;  on  nat- 
ural selection,  18 

Korchinsky,  H.,  on  nat- 
ural selection,  17 

Kitasato,  Japanese  bacteri- 
ologist, on  plague  infec- 
tion, 65 

Lamarckian  theory,  26-28 

Leeuwenhoek,        Antonius 

von,  microscopist,  161 


INDEX 


Leprosy,  65 

Life:  created  by  life,  4,  37; 
destroys  life,  113;  not 
physico-chemical  in  or- 
igin or  nature,  35,  131, 
186;  origin  of,  unknown, 
89 

Limestone  formed  by  fora- 
minifera,  81-84 

Loeb,  Prof.,  experiments 
on  living  embryos,  38-39 

McBride,  E.  W.,  on  nat- 
ural selection,  14 

MacCallum,  Prof.  W.  G., 
fever  a  protective  reac- 
tion, 142 

Metchnikoff's  theory  of 
immunity,  128 

Microbes  the  beginning 
and  the  end  of  life,  74 

Milton's  conception  of  cre- 
ation, 2 

Mind:  back  of  all  nat- 
ural laws,  152;  can  be 
felt,  195 

Multicellular  antagonistic 
to  unicellular  forms,  103- 
105 

Nageli,  Prof.  Carl  W.,  on 

the  Darwinian  theory,  11 
Natural  selection,  7,  11-12; 

opponents  of  the  theory, 

14^19 
Nucleus,  24,  42;  in  foraml- 

nifera,  83 
Nuttall,  Prof.  George  H. 

F.,  on  blood  tests,  51 


Opinions,  how  formed,  187- 
188 


Opsonins,  bacteria  de- 
stroyers, 105 

Orthogenesis,  or  predeter- 
mination, 28 

Osborn,  Prof.  H.  F.,  on  the 
Darwinian  theory,  15 

Pangenesis,  101 

Pearson,  Prof.  Karl,  on  the 

Darwinian  theory,  10 
Pituitary  gland,  144;  acro- 

megaly  caused  by  disease 

of,  144 
Protoplasm     the     physical 

basis  of  life,  22 
Protozoa,  77-78 
Pyrrhonists,  180 

Repair,  power  of,  in  an- 
imals, 46-48 

Reproduction  and  hered- 
itary descent  inseparable 
from  life,  44 

Responsibility  is  of  per- 
sons, not  of  things,  191- 
193 

Roux,  Prof.  Wilhelm,  on 
the  Darwinian  theory,  14 

Salamander,  power  of  re- 
pair, 46-47 
Sarcode,  82-83 
Sarcoma,  31,  113-117 
Skepticism,    definition    of, 
180;  contrasted  with  in- 
credulity, 181 
Skin  grafting,  114-115 
Sleeping  sickness,  78 
Smallpox   an    ancient   dis- 
ease, 65;  germs  contrast- 
ed    with      yellow-fever 
germs,  66-67 


205 


INDEX 


Sound,  vibrations  of,  rate 
of  travel,  165 

Spencer,  Herbert,  on  trans- 
mission of  acquired  char- 
acters, 25 

Spontaneous  generation,  7- 
8 

Sutton,  Bland,  on  tumors, 
32 

Sympathetic,  the  great, 
146-150 


Taste,  sense  of,  man  dis- 
satisfied with,  157-158 

Touch,  the  queen  of  our 
senses,  168;  the  instru- 
ment of  the  mind,  170 

Tubercle  bacillus,  repro- 
ductive powers  of,  68-69 

Tuberculosis  described  by 
Hippocrates,  64 

Tumors  and  cancerous 
growths,  31-33 

Tyndall,  matter  eternal,  29 


Unicellular  organisms  are 
unchangeable,  87-89;  an- 
tagonistic to  multicellu- 
lar,  103-105 

Vegetable  bacteria,  74-77 
Vitality,     importance     of, 
106-112 

Wart  defined,  31 

Wasps,  heredity  in,  54-56 

Wasserman,  Prof.,  on 
blood-tests,  50 

Weismann,  Prof.  August, 
on  transmission  of  ac- 
quired characters,  24 

Whale,  biological  history 
of,  40-43,  45,  47-48 

Whitney,  Prof.,  on  ferti- 
lizing bacteria,  77 

Wilson,  Prof.  E.  B.:  on 
cell  development,  102;  on 
fitness,  133 

Yellow  fever  and  smallpox 
germs  contrasted,  66-67 


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